A TOUCH OF FIRE

A Thesis

Presented to

The Faculty of Graduate Studies

of

The University of Guelph

b

LLOYD W. RANG

In partial Wlment of requirements

for the degree of

Master of Arts

September, 1999

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A TOUCH OF FlRE

Lloyd W. Raag Advisor: University of Guelph, 1999 Dr. Janice Kulyk-Keefer

This thesis is an excerpt fiom a campus noveI in progress.

Jeffery MacArthur, a young historian who is the protagonist/narrator, is convuiced that he has "the touch of £ire," a quasi-mythicai gifl which compels hirn to see entropy and immolation everywhere. When a strmger named Mitchell Quist, (a Nova Scotia historian with the apparent ability to forecast the future), cornes to town, MacArthur takes him as a housemate. They befi-iend two women, Claudia Lefebvre and Diana Dunn, each of whom, like Mitchell Quist and Jeffery, have erased their pasts and family histories. As each character's past and motivation are revealed, the resulting conflicts Iead to reflections on identity, myth and the place of academia withïn a broader culture. While the novel's beginning/ending is tragic and violent it is also, paradoxically, a moment of rebirth and redemption. This preparation of this thesis would have been dificult without the research

assistance of the University of Guelph Library and the Oshawa Public Library. Additional

information was provided by the Chinese Consulate in Ottawa, Bnan Wagter of the

Dunnville VoIunteer Fire Department, the Otis Elevator Corporation, Margaret Appleby at

OMFRA, Dr. D.G. Bell, and Ancathus Interiors of Port Hope, Ontario. My employer, '

Durham Christian High School, gave me a leave of absence to pursue this project and the

School of Literatures and Performance Studies in English at the University of Guelph provided facilities and an inspirational environment.

This thesis would have been (at best) lackluster were it not for the patient guidance of my supervisor, Janice Kulyk-Keefer. 1 am also thankful to the members of my examination cornmittee: Stephen Henighan, Patrick HoIIand and Judith Thompson.

Significant edits were pe~ormedby Sandra Rang, Hugh Cook, Kevin VanderMeulen, Paul

Winkelhorst, Johanna Hiernstra, Morgan Demis, Maryanne Kaay and William Katerberg.

Each provided significant feedback and criticism of the work in progress. Sandra gave me tremendous support. And, though a spouse can encourage a project's completion, it takes a soulmate to truly inspire it- to let the electronic genie out of the bottle. This- thesis would never have been written were it not for the life's labor of the late Dr. George A. Rawlyk; a brilliant scholar, a taskrnaster, a compelling teacher and a good man who cast a long, bear-like shadow over the lives and work of al1 of his students.

This thesis is dedicated to him. TABLE OF CONTENTS

1). Acknowledgrnents

2). Table of Contents

3). Preface

4). Chapter One

5). Chapter Two

6). Chapter Three

7). Chapter Four

8). Chapter Five

9). Chapter Six

10). Theoretical Considerations

11). Bibtiography

12). Appendix For Alline, in particular, there was no such thing as linear history. Since God lived in

what he ofien referred to as the "Une Etemul Now, " surely, the Falrnouth preacher argued, the truly redeemed of the Lord "must inhabit the same" at precisely the moment he or she reached out to the Almighty since "the work of conversion is instantaneous." According to AlLine, for al1 those who had experienced the New Birth, there was indeed no sense of "Tirne, and Space, and Successive Periods."

George A. Rawlyk, Champions of the Truth. p. 33.

yathii ptakasayaty ekah One sun illumines krtsnarn lokam imam ravih the entire worId ksetrarn ksetn tath2 krtsnarn Likewise, the Lord of the field prakasayati bhhta illumines the entire field. ksetraksetrajiiayor evam. Those who have the insight to know antamm jfi~acaksusa About this distinction b hutaprakrtimoksam ca between field and master of the field ye vidur yiinti te panirn And about fieedorn fiom existence and matter Are on their way to the highest goal.

The BhagavadgTta XIII. 33-34 A Touch Of Fire Chapter One

Put offa waiting Saviour no longer, lest you lose your Sou1 to al1 Eternity. You Say you cannot think that God dl convert, or Bring your sou! into Liberty this evening, and yet, 1 dare Say you expect he wiIl some other Time, and this is the very thing that still keeps you fiom Hfm ...

- Henry Alline- A Sermon Preached on the 19~of February, 1783 at Fort-Midway

This is the myth of myself:

Not everything E love is destroyed, but almost everything. I've lost enough to convince me that 1 have the touch of fire. Without warning, a kind of burning spits from my hands or my eyes, sucks the air fiom around itselfand leaves only wire, nails and bones behind. It's not, of course, only what 1 love that's destroyed. OAen, it's cornmonplace people or objects. Like pedestrians in yeilow ski coats and toques, or bungalows with loose sofit where swallows nest-

But these obliterations don? alarm me anyrnore. After all, I've been living with this condition since 1was twelve years old and, believe it or not, I've become used to it. It3swhen my fiends are consumed that my rnyth's price becomes apparent.

Mine may be more dramatic than most, but everyone has a personal myth. My fiiend

Diana, for example, could squint into daylight and tell you what phase the moon was in or spot wild spearmint growing next to sidewalks. But where Diana felt the pulse of nature beating below the pavement and the patient push of tree roots on foundations and basement walls,

Claudia saw obstacles to progress. Her gaze was like a supermarket price gun. Green spaces were undeveloped land and kids playing on orange plastic park slides were future clients. 1'm not exaggerating. Then again, a lot of people mythologize the world in Claudia's terms and consider themselves realists. No one thinks it abnormal to reduce humanity to mouths hungry for frozen Thai dinners or to sweat glands to be plugged by aluminum-based anti-perspirants.

1 Such grotesque transfigurations are the religion of men in silk power ties crouching over

squiggly graphs as though they're analysing the auspices. But if I said that I see decay and

immolation around me, I'd be called alien and dangerous. So it's for good reasons that i've kept

my myth quiet until now.

Now, of course, it's a matter of public record, or its effects are, at any rate. A headline in the papers. And no one should have known, except that the one time I allowed myself to pretend as though my myth weren't true, the moment I let my guard down, I aimost lost everything.

Just two months ago, I was walking home on an Ontario summer day. The air was like porridge. The kind of amiosphere in which even sounds are dampened, slurring as they leave the mouth. Al1 1could hear were the laboured scufings of my worn-dom sneaker heels against the pavement and the spit and clatter of a single lawn sprinkler.

The Cessna's engine, mumbling to itseIf, went unnoticed at first. I could have been thinking about the bowl of Cheenos I'd forgotten on the table, by then a sweaty stew. Or about my backpack, filled with hard-bound dissertations from the archives, its one good strap biting into my shoulder. Or whether Diana was still in my bed, sleeping with the sheet twisted and damp around her legs. So, when the plane's voice behind me gathered into a rumble pounding across my chest, it was already too Iate to shout.

The plane skimmed a few rnetres overhead, dipped its wing lightly to the right to adjust for the curvature ofthe street and slammed into my house, ripping away the brown shingled roof like a scab. 1 stopped. The house's square sides swelted into an orange ball. Naturai gas and aviation fuel coalesced into a blinding bud, opening as it fed from the gasoline that had been stored behind the cockpit. When the fiery wind from the explosion rushed over to smother me, it seemed, 1 thought, strangely cold.

The way Dante Alighieri described it, the centre of hell is fiozen motionless except for

the wind stirred up by the arch-traitor Lucifer, bound fiom the chest downward by solid ice.

There, the one whom God had called the fairest of his angels weeps and beats his fleshy wings.

From my experience, Alighieri's imagery is accurate, ***

My ex-girlfiiend, Rochelle, the visual artist fiom Ottawa, said that 1 radiated warmth.

That was at the beginning of our relationship. She told me this on the patio of the Sole Café, daubing the sweat from a glass of Niagara chardonnay with the length of her fingers. While we talked, 1 saw myself splashed in the oils of her eyes, the Iight of an aftemoon Sun making me brilliant.' By the last time I saw her, (it was in January, and a snow squalf had forced us inside the old green gazebo at Lakeside Park), it was cIear that her efforts to paint me in al1 those shades of red and orange had becorne too much. She was spent, probably fiom chipping her way out of me with the butt end of a paintbrush. She thrust her hands into her jacket pockets and cailed me a cold-hearted bastard, turning into the snow and the night as the wind fiom Lake

Ontario picked up behind me. ***

1 could end the story here. You know the fate of JeRery MacArthur and the people, relationships and objects around him. Everything is destroyed. In fact, 1 suspect that the introduction to this story will also be its conclusion. 110 Rideau Street, in La Salle, Ontario, with its mossy wooden back porch and lazy garden of chives and coriander, will explode after a plane, flying low on a Iate-summer moming, razes it. Character, plot and theme revealed in a few terse tines. I suppose this makes me a bad novelist, since novelists dont usually give away the

endings oftheir books. Historians like me, on the other hand, are bound to. Most people know,

for example, that John F. Kennedy died in Dealy Plaza in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963.

The assassination of JFK was one of the most intensely examined events in US history. There

were eighty-two still and movie photographers known to have been in Dealy Plaza at that time.

Attempts have been made to identifi every person in every frame of film. Their backgrounds

have been checked and their testirnonies taken. The Warren Commission alone amassed

millions of pages of printed documents. Yet there is no significant agreement on either what

happened or what the event meant. Lee Oswald has been portrayed as both a communist hater and a Leninist sympathizer. As a violent dmnk and a teetotal ler. He was described in the news as ranging in height fkom five-foot six to six-foot two. Did he act alone? Or was he a "patsy" as he claimed just before Jack Ruby drilled him?

Questions like these show that the histonan's work isn't about illustrating outcomes.

It's about revealing causes. In certain cases, like JFK7sassassination, even the outcome is a matter of dispute. I know some respectable thinkers who believe he7sstill alive, though they don? Say so publicly. Their intuition tells them to distrust the ending they've been given.

Maybe I'm naive to think that historicaI events can be explained. Historians have a difficult and underappreciated job, given how sceptical people have become and how awkward we make matters for ourselves. We're like detectives who have intentionally let the trail run several decades coId, as though present events were not challenging enough.

Take a distant moment like Hiroshima or Nagasaki, for instance. We don't understand motives. We can't know the minds of the characters in the narrative. Why were the Enola Gay and Bock's Car the planes chosen to drop the bombs? What went through the mind of J. Robert Oppenheimer when he saw the very first atornic bomb sucking up the desert air, burning the sand

into beads of green glass?

We know that, as the cloud of sundered atoms rose over Trinity, New Mexico, he

paraphrased the words of Lord Krishna from the Bhagmiad Gita:

- Now I am become death, the destroyer of worfds.

But how did he sketch himself in the decades that followed, his face bitten by the heat of what he had created? What was his myth?

Mitchell Quist would have dissected that word. He would have said:

- You're so quaint, Jefie. No one talks about myth anyrnore. Myth needs the capacity for universal tnith, which we've lost. Instead of Iooking for tmth we go searching for untmth; we've become obsessed by what Ianguage can't Say. And if language itself is mangled, how can you ever hope to find rnyth in the wreckage? If you ask me, we've first got to find the courage to use words, to believe in language. Then the myths wiIl corne back.

Mitchell Quist was always speaking like that. He had a prophet's gifl for cryptic pronouncements, though they usually made sense, given enough time. 1 think he had it backwards, though. Myth doesn't always need to have words because it's the organizing principte of al1 Life, whether we know it or not. Some myths are silent, just waiting to be discovered. That's why 1 write history. My job is to write rnyths for dead people by entering the paper muddle that is the unremembered past.

Because I'rn just a student, I'm not considered tmstworthy enough to write pfainly, the way I'd like to. I write as cautiously as a teenager at a driver's exam; in a colon-spiked academese, that inverts and eviscerates English as though 1 were translating my own words from nineteenth century German. But this history is something different. The history you are reading doesn't have to bother with footnotes, sources and archives. It's subjective narrative. It's unique, too, because it's being wrïtten while 1 sit at a pub table, arranging fragments of scrap paper and cocktail napkins into a manuscript. How 1 have chosen to tell my story is calculated, 1'11 admit.

But it has to be told carefully; more carefully and tmthfully than any well documented, acadernic history. As for 'mith," that's another unfashionable word. It's hard to even Say it aloud:

- True.

Because 1 know what caused the crash. It was me. Or, rather, that rnythical or fantastic part of me smouldering underground beneath the wry smile and the apologetic posture. I'm an unlikely suspect, because the kind of trail I've left is detectable only to a historian with uncommon sensibilities. In other words, the cause is apparent only to me. That's not hubris if you consider how ofien histories get written that way. The memoirs of Henry Kissinger or the letters of Desiderius Erasmus are examples of history perforrned and written with the authority of self-conscious and mythically minded actors. Certainly one learns more fiom them than fiom joumalists.

The local paper, the La Salle Examiner, carried stories about the disaster for about a week afterwards and the major national dailies covered it for about half that time. Maybe you even read about me and have since forgotten. My name was mentioned in the articles. 1 highlighted these words fiom the July 3 1, 1992 Examiner:

- "Graduate student Jefiey [sic] MacArthur, who rented at the house on Rideau Street, was nearby at the time of the explosion. He was unhurt."

In 1945, so was Oppenheimer. ***

My master's degree at La Salle University has been three and a half years in the making so far. This is something of a record in a department that turns out graduate students like fniit flies from a petri dish. My specialty is Canadian religious history. When I submitted my first thesis proposal, I was studying Presbyterian and Anglican church architecture in Southern

Ontario. That was two topics ago. Right now, my interests are in the maritime Baptists and the work of eighteenth century revivalist minister Henry Alline. Each time 1 change topics, the department gives me a new batch of fùnding in the form of travel grants and, less often, bursaries.

I'm used to yipping and wrestling with the other pups in the pack for intellectual and fiduciary dominance. I'm what you could cal1 an "alpha" graduate student. I excel at the games that define status. The university continues to pay me because 1 write compelling proposals to the department. But 1 write compelling proposals because 1 don? just study the past, 1 see it.

More specifically, I've got a historical gift that's the flip-side of rny myth. it's the ability to spot where history has been buried. For instance, where some people simply walk across a Street, 1 see trolley tracks like veins beneath the asphalt. Visiting Toronto, I scan sideways for granite headstones, not upwards at glass high rises Iike regular tourists. I can't bear to look up there, but

I always do. Suddenly I'll feel hot and lightheaded. My knees spasm, like the ground is buckling. That's where my myth cornes in.

While businesspeopre and bankers might think of themselves as angels or Olympian gods, 1know that the people in the Toronto Dominion Centre are just as corporeal as the rotting ape meat in the backyard of Jarvis St. Baptist Church. When I see suits and skirts bustling downtown, removed trom their skyscraper offices, I watch as they corne apart. Toppling over one by one and dying right there on the pavement while others walk by. At least the corpses in graveyards are aiready dead. There's nothing more that 1 can do to them. I'd like to think that 1 can even help them, in lirnited ways, if I tell their stories. But the living don't get much help

fiom me.

Sometimes I think that I'd like to see life differently, but 1 have no choice. 1 cal1 the

effect of my myth, (or worldview, you could say) the ''touch of fire" because fire reduces

complex cells and structures to charred heaps that never regain their shapes and colours. So do

1. Whatever fire touches it burns, causing heat which causes more fire. So do 1. Like

combustion, my myth is a blind and aimless force of nature. The fact that it's my nature doesn't make it any less elemental. Ifs destructive, self-generating and irreversible. ***

My experience with the touch of fire started the summer after high school, with the sideways bmsh of a pretty pharmacy cashier's hand pouring out change. 1 imagined her forty years older. Her skin became a loose, velvet drapery. She was consumed as I watched. 1 tried to look away but couldn't, I tried to make a sound, to warn her, but didn't- 1 had the sense that what was happening had its origin in me, that 1 had a fire inside that wouldn't let go of her until it had fWy emptied out of me. In seconds, my eyes had evaporated her and 1 was finally able to pocket my change. Later that day I was fieaking out on the rec-room couch at Dunlop's, smoking a joint and staring for what seemed like hours into the ashtray. The paranoid and stoned part of me suggested that I phone the pharmacy and offer to sweep up the mess I'd made. At the same time, reason (or what passed for it) suggested it had been a vision and that calhg would either be met with derision or the kind of clinical condescension resewed for cranks and looneys.

Most contemporary people confuse mysticism with insanity. OccasionaIly, when 1 meet someone Iike Mitchell Quist whose gifts seemed so different from my own, I make the same m istaken diagnosis. Since that day at the pharmacy, I have turned most of the people I've met into the dead or dying. Sometimes it happens at first sight, sometimes it takes awhile. But eventually it gets everyone. To meet me, though, you'd never know it. i've leamed not to alarrn anyone, since

I'm the only one aware of what's happening. 1 hide my own reactions by being a wisecracker.

An irony forge. A Devil's advocate, too, especialIy when 1 teach undergraduate seminars.

About this I am unasharned. But what I take seriously is my chosen profession. History is a passion and a comfort for me, maybe the last I have lefi.

Because the university is a place immune from time, 1 can pursue this passion without too much distraction. Compared to a hospital, where life is measured out in floors, the university offers a kind of immortality. Tt's like a whole town of Dorian Grays. Freshmen (springy and smooth-skinned) are poured in once: a year and the oldest bodies, just before they bald and bulge, are shipped away. So, if you can somehow hug the brickwork with your back, or lurk in the archives breathing the attic smell of other people's lives, then the university can be an excelIent shelter from marriages, mortgages and al1 irnmediate news of the war that gravity is busily waging against people's skins. Unless you corne to grad school late, with kids and spouse in tow, you can block the sound of time's foot-soldiers marching, the ground underneath them heaving and sucking like mud in the Somme.

I intend to enjoy univers@ life for as long as possible, preferably right up unti1 the day when the fiinding finally dries up and 1 awake one moming to find the student loan people bivouacked on the lawn.

Which is why, on the day that Claudia Lefebvre and Mitchell Quist arrived at the La

Salle train station, I was in my second year of my master's, but with just a single file of notes on

Methodist circuit riders of the late nineteenth century to show for it. Although they both arrived in La Salle by train, she (coming fiom Toronto) stepped out ont0 platform "A" while he (travelling from Nova Scotia) set his bags down on platform "B."

Their trains would arrive six hours apart and, two months later, on Halloween night, she would toast him with tequila and remark that it was a great coïncidence that they had both chosen to take the train into La Salle. From a historical perspective, this is not strange. Many people have arrived by train, in La Salle, six hours apart or less.

What was strange was that their story became my story: that it ripped open wounds over a decade old. What was strange was that they needed my personal myth to give their story its ending. And that he claimed he saw it al1 coming, but did nothing to stop it. ***

Last year, at 9 AM on a mid-August day, the head secretary of the history department phoned me. Mrs. Kendall's calls are usually about money. 1 was apprehensive when 1 heard Iier on the Iine. She is unrnistakable. Imagine a Welsh coal miner's voice that's been trained by years of careiül cigarette smoking. Fit the voice in a brittle sexagenarian with skin the colour of Columbo's raincoat. You would have cloned Marjorie Kendall, who has been at Trent Hall for such a long time that she makes even the senior faculty nervous. She's the departmental

Panopticon, al1 seeing and al1 powefil, her threat resting on what she could Say, if she chose.

- Jeffery, I'm sorry to ring you so early. I hope you weren't still sleeping?

- No, 1 lied.

- We are expecting a new graduate student. He is coming to La Salle fiom Nova Scotia, and, (now 1 know this is a huge imposition, so please Say 'no' if you must) we were wondering if you wouldn't mind billeting him at your house for a few weeks. it might not even be that long, if he's able to find a place quickly.

- A few weeks? We can afford the space here, Mrs. Kendall, but my budget's strapped.

I'm also doing some pretty heavy research right now, so 1don? real ly have the rime to chaperone anyone around the city.

There was no "we" at my house. My housemate was a guy named Rumi. I called hirn

"Invisible Rumi" because, while his mail came to the house, he iived on the other side of town with his girlfiend. He was a Bengali Muslim, she a Virginian Baptist, and, since their union was fiowned upon by both families, they did their syncretic dance in secret. Or they would, at least until the fetish of the forbidden loosened its grip on them, which 1 calculated would be sometime that winter. Not that I wished it on them. But I'd seen hirn alone at the University

Centre cafeteria with a Pepsi and a slice of pizza during the previous Ramadan, and he was

Iooking very unhappy indeed.

- Well, if you thought you couldn't afford it, you could get an expense form fiom us: the department would foot the bill. The time cornmitment would be minimal. 1trust that might be an offer suited to your tastes?

Bingo.

1 sat up in bed and reached for the pen and paper I kept on my night stand. I could hear the neighbour's lawnmower droning outside. There was a crunch as she hit a Stone, followed by a brief seminar in creative swearing. It occurred to me that this new guy had applied deep into the summer, well past Kendall's ordinarily ironciad deadline, but he was still getting an acceptance and firnding. 1 made up my mind to dislike him.

- He can stay on the couch in the living roorn. What's his name?

Mitchell Quist would arrive by train in a week and study under Dr. Royden Van Loewen, a South Afircan who had been at Berkeley in the '60's and who was an expert on the United

Empire Loyalists. Mitchell Quist's choice of school and scholar made good sense. La Salle is

a natural pilgrimage site for students of colonial Canada. The French built the first European

structure here in 1673. A wooden stockade was hastily strapped together on a prornontory,

defending the place where the Great Lakes agree that the St. Lawrence River should start.

Though the garrison was gradually increased and the fort developed into a srna11 tom, it was too

far away fiom the rest of New France and, when war came in 1756, a British colonel named

Plaxton took it easily and levelled the fort. Twenty years later, however, Loyalists, evicted by

fi-eedom-crazed Americans, swanned the area and tumed La Salle into a haven for British

monarchists, leaving the French a pissed-off minority in their own tom.

The priority for the new settlers was the defence of sound doctrine. Several Protestant

churches entrenched themselves to protect fiom lurking francophone heresy. Each tried to outdo

the other denominations' building, but the Catholics eventually won by taking full advantage of

the Anglophones' divisiveness. St. Marie's cathedra1 hired real Bavarian pipe organ builders

and completed the tallest and greyest steeple of al1 the area churches. It dominated the skyline

into the 1960's because of an old city bylaw, (men in a rare display of clerical solidarity),

that no building in town could be taller than the highest church, which was quite a feat of

selective hermeneutics for people whose Bible included the Tower of Babel. But, if there was

a theological contradiction in al1 of this, the bricklayers certainly wouldn't have pointed it out.

In the early 1800s, Glaswegian Stone masons came to shape the Iimestone fiom the

blistered hiils surrounding the town into biocky Georgian rnansions, churches, an arrowhead-

shaped fortress and a college building, the ancestor of La Salle University. Surveyors imposed two identical grids on eitker side of the La Salle river, gripped together the two halves with a bridge and scuttled away to make lucrative advances on another patch of wi Idemess for the

Empire.

These days, La Salle is a town cloaked in the grey limestone mantle of the Loyalists.

You can imagine a tirne, once, when the city was alive with shouts fiom wooden scaffolds and

the squeak of buggy sprïngs. But you have to strain to hear those particular ghosts. Every day,

the car tires spin more loudly in the slush. The powerboats in the harbour get more hungry for

speed. You can feel the pulse of the town quickening, feel the pavement lapping up the sun and

slowly exhaling the heat into the early evening. Yet it is in that same summer sun that La

Salle's streets tum into bright green concourses where tourists stroll amid horse car&and Street

fiddlers. Or, in the winter, sometimes the blanketing snow tucks al1 the cars into driveways

while the ci? drifts into a white sleep.

La Salle is al1 about contrasts and collisions like these. It lies at the confluence of two rivers and a lake. It is the indifferent face ofthe Revenue Canada building beside the invitingly narned Marie Arms. it's a place where the firneral homes and the firrniture stores are still owned by the same family, as in the days when carpenters split their duty between craffing caskets and chesterfieids. Or where the still-bitter descendants of duelling ethnicities fly the Union Jack on

Canada Day or the Fleur De Lys on St. Jean Baptiste Day. La SaIle is not part of the central

Ontario parking lot stretching fiom GM in St. Catharines to GM in Oshawa. Tt does not ransack its landscape, except in the suburbs where the houses are spaced like supermarket miIk-cartons, where Jumbo Video and Mac's Milk serve as the community church and city square. These are inevitable concessions, perhaps, to bland contemporary culture. But at least &a Salle's core doesn't hide under cosmetic neon or giass, tuming the dignity of its age intio painted-over desperation. There are old prides and deep loves exposed with a kind of fi-ankness that seems quaint or kitschy to the bourgeois rnind. But it was this very collision between past and present that brought Mitchell Quist here, he claimed. He came to be written into the landscape and to rewrite La Salle completely,

if you ask me, he very nearly accomplished both.

On the other hand, no one knows what drew Claudia here. Not even me, and I know her family (because of some detective work), more intimately than I know Mitchell Quist's. * * +

She shipped her three-closet wardrobe fiom Toronto to La SaIle a week pnor to her arrival. A friend from Montreal driving home along the 401 dropped off her boxes. We never saw him again. Diana was there already. ARer all, it was her apartment.

She had never met Claudia Lefebvre. The arrangement for shared accommodation was made through the landlady. There had been a telephone interview, naturally, but Diana had been manually grinding chickpeas for her hummus recipe at the time. She mashed with one hand and balanced the receiver with the other. When the Montreal fkiend arrived, four dishwasher-sized boxes of clothing were pushed and rolled end-over-end into the two bedroom unit over the

Prickly Pear. Claudia Iater swore that she'd mentioned how rnuch stuff she had, but Diana was unprepared.

Probably, nothing could have prepared Diana for Claudia. It was like the introduction of rabbits to Australia or purple loosestrife into Canadian wetlands in the Iate 1980's. It is possible to be bom on the same planet and originate fiom difEerent worlds.

Ernpedocles of Sicily believed that the cosmos consisted of four natura1 elements: earth, air, fire and water. Modern chemistry puts the actual number at ninety-some, but i think that four are more versatile for poetic and philosophical purposes. Elizabethan authors thought so, too, The plays of William Shakespeare, for exarnple, reveal a tightly woven universe. An imbalance of the elements could lead to fires, floods, earthquakes, regicide. Earth and air were opposites. Water and fire as well. Opposites shoutd not combine. It's a simple system and elegant, which is probably why it's urifashionable now,

For late twentieth-century North Americans, philosophy is Like wine: to be swank, it has to be French. Mitchel t Quist, for one, savoured French thinkers. Fashion notwithsbnding, 1 like the tart but fil[ bodied taste of classical philosophy. But some people think both are eIitist nonsense and prefer something even more basic. Like Diana Lynn Dunn, a connaisseur of high theory who, nevertheless, tried to keep things down to earth.

She owned two cats: GlorïaandNaomi, who had made a pair of miniature duvets on her futon out of their endlessly shedding fur. They also spread tumbleweed hair balls which mixed with long strands of Diana's own under the living room radiator and behind the couch. Tufis that rolled aIong the kitchen floor were eventually arrested by splotches of fallen jam or honey and became fiizzy bugs.

Much of Diana's clothing was made in third world countries and soId at first world prices to the fashionably guilty. She wore thick, braided belts that pleated the men's second-hand jeans she wore, cinching them to her waist. Her shirts and sweaters were tents over a tawny body whose terrain only a few knew. Her legs were shockingly bohemian and were interpreted as

"politicaI" by tesbians, fetishists and preppy boys at the Prickly Pear, al1 of whom she told, loud enough to be heard over the ABBA remix, "it's just hair, not the Magna fiicking Carta." 1 aIso remember her in Birkenstock sandals and woollen socks, trudging through an inch of salty, brown La Salle slush without complaint. She never lifted her feet very high, a habit she'd picked up at her place, where the cats often annexed the hallways and doors. Her hair smelled of patchouli incense fiom Singapore, tandoor and vindaloo takeout hmCurry-Scurry, and a playful wraith of market-fresh bai1 lurking around for good measure. The scent of her spiced skin was so strong it would find its way into the mugs and biscuits she kept in her kitchen cupboard. 1 ofien thought that having coffee at her house was like the Eucharist, That she was the host in more ways than one.

When Claudia rapped on the apartrnent door for the first time, her long butterscotch blond hair became the first item in their Iist of regularly updated differences. The second item was decor. Against the red bnck~orkin the hallway, Claudia had teaned a five-foot taIl and recently Iacquered aircraft propeller.

Empedocles also believed in the transmigration of the soul, Sinners would wander, he said, for thirty thousand seasons through the souk of others. He also wrote that nothing ever cornes into being or is destroyed, but the elements are transformed into each other. Love binds the elements. Strife pushes them apart.

According to John Calvin, whose tenets I abandoned when 1 was younger, God aIready knew who would be bound to him forever and which of us would suffer for eternity. That's the doctrine of predestination, and probabIy accounts for the fiequency with which the word "dour" is used as a preflx for "Calvinist."

The Calvinists 1 knew back home in Aftercliffe, though, were pretty sunny folk. If eternal life is a crap-shoot, then why worry? Calvinism is one of the few branches of

Christianity which doesn't really discourage smoking and drinking. Why bother? Salvation is, after all, a part of death; on or off, in or out. No purgatory to obscure the lines in the colouring book. What makes Calvinism so abhorrent to many, including me, is "total depravity," the belief

a 16 that people are so completely sinfil they can do nothing to earn God's favour. Henry Alline,

wrïting in his journal just afier the American Revolution, charged that Calvinists believe in a

"sham offer of salvation." God offers salvation to all, but saves only at his whim.

Now who wants to work for a boss who can't be satisfied? It seems to me that God

doesn't value goodness. If he did, the world wouldn't be such a shitty place. Such a God is not

love,

If I still believed, attended one of those Presbyterian churches where the basement fùrnace is kiln-hot, belching out vaporous afghans at the end of August to shroud the bones of shivering old men and women, then I would probably still see the day that Christ's feet and hands were pierced as the day when strife finally pushed love aside for eternity. * * *

When 1 first met Mitchell Rawson Quist, standing in the half-lit grey of a La Salle afternoon, 1 noticed his hands. Massive. Cracked like a section of breakwater, or as if he had grafted old leather gloves to his wrists. When 1 think of how to describe him, it's hard to resist poetic images like that. Still, when it cornes to describing his character, any definition of

Mitchell Quist is bound to be slippery.

In many ways he was like an ocean, or how I imagine oceans, since I've never seen one.

Or an avatar of the ocean-- beautifid, powertùl, self-assured. He reasoned like someone who had lived his whole life fixed in one place, but had so completely plumbed its depths he might as well have travelled the globe. What Mitchell Quist had leamed to see was how the world could be navigated if you respected it like you would an ocean, and if you believed that nature, especially human nature, is ruled by language. He said this with absolute conviction. And 1, who had lived my early life on the shores of brackish fieshwater among dairy farmers and flannel- jacketed junkies, who was 1 to Say otherwise? It drove me crazy how formidable he could be and how he could rernind me, just by being around, where 1 had corne fkorn. ***

- Certainty, Jeffie, buddy. It's bunk.

Mitchell Quist itched the pub tabletop, scraping away the varnish that clung to it like an old sunburn.

- That's what you want. You think you should be employed in a job that, by Jesus, lets you earn a fat wad of cash for doing nothing. Then, you'll corne home to your soulmate and make love in a way that poets will celebrate for a thousand years. Anything short of that won? cut the mustard for you.

- You Say that as though it's not possible.

Mitchell Quist Iaughed.

We were engaged in Our usual conversational cut-and-thrust. We did this once or twice a week on average, in the early days of our fiiendship. Our battlefield was The Sole Café, a bar which tunes its eclectic decor to the vibe of a university crowd. Black and white pictures of dead pop icons paper the cheaply panelled walls. The menu is just as varied, ranging from cheesecake and coffee to Guinness and Smithwick's on tap. Floors are worn down to barn-board texture. Food barnacies even the clean silverware, but no one notices. UnbaIanced ceil ing fans gyrate ten feet above a bog of unmovable air. There are clanging pinball machines in one corner. The hum and clack of conversations and cutlery are steady, overlaid with Loreena

McKe~itor undermined by Tom Waits, depending upon who's behind the bar. It's the perfect spot for artsy types to whine about professors, multinational corporations and the Greenhouse

Effect while hunkered over a pint of beer almost thick enough to eat with a fork. Which is what we always did fiom our reguiar table beneath a poster of Buddy Holly.

Many students go down to the Sole to escape studyingor to get swizzled. Mitchell Quist and 1 went there to toss ideas up in the air. For Mitchell Quist, my ideas were target practice.

A regular skeet shoot. He said 1 was confused. 1 said that he subscribed to a fictitiousjournal called Bad Ideas From France.

- Happy lives aren't impossible, Jefie, but they're not certain. You could get a tenure- track position at McGill, but you could also be hit by a 1987 Chrysler New Yorker tomorrow.

The odds are good that you'll turn your fancy degree into a nice cornfortable Iittle house near a mal1 with a Bi-Way in it. You'll find yourself a nice girl who drools like a zamboni in her sleep.

So what? Your image of a perfect life is a red herring, Jeffie. Out East, a lot of people are happy that theyrve kept the rain off themselves and kept the house fiom the bank. But you believe the world is ugly. If you see ugliness, you will lose your soul.

It was my turn to laugh.

- You use terrns like they're rneaningful. Belief. Soul. Good. No one believes in belief anymore. Besides, 1 thought you were a post-deconstructionist something or another. Don't you think the soul's just a function of discourse?

Clarence the bartender strafed our table, jet-black ponytail in flight as he zipped by.

Mitchell Quist rnotioned for two more, raising his fingers in a "V." Clarence squinted back through the smoke and swooped expertly behind the bar. Mitchell Quist took my seventh

DuMaurier of the night and butted it out, leaned back and swept a tide of hair from the Coast of his eyebrows.

- There's no such thing as "just" a fùnction of discourse, Jefie. Everything is discourse, but it doesn't mean there's no such thing as "reality." Fog instance: you're a smoker. You dont believe in the Health and Welfare warnings on the package, you Say it's al1 just a bunch of words. But it's not discourse that makes the cancer appear- it's your ignorance of language is the power that eats at you, ultimately. Maybe you think the package and the warnings construct reality a certain way. Maybe they do. You can Say that the package is an example of state interference in your precious personai liberty. Probably is. But it's not the state or discourse you're thinking of as the chemotherapy IV drips into your am. You might not believe in a soul.

Or you might call it by a dieerent name. Doesn't mean you can't lose it.

1hate semantics. But he had scored an oblique point. He usually did on topics ranging fiom John Locke to Loch Ness. It seemed to me that he knew things that were impossible for hirn to know and could predict events as though they were memories, not premonitions. 1wasn't alone in this feeling. He could address a seminar or a crowd around a pool table and leave the impression he was speaking only to you. What sounded absurd coming from anyone else seemed, to those around him, like the clasps of a treasure chest opening. The few times that 1 eclipsed him in a debate, it was temporary- a strategy designed to draw a gasp fiom his audience. 1 hated it when he did that.

Although he always won Our arguments, 1 seldom let him convince me. ***

Claudia hated Diana's cats. She was.allergic to cat dander, she claimed. Often. She bought antihistamines and charged them to the graduate student drug plan. 1'11 go out on a Iimb and suggest that her allergies were fictitious. Diana hadn't mentioned Gloria and Naomi to

Claudia during the night of the hummus phone call. Claudia, though, had downplayed her wardrobe and al1 its bangles and baubles unnvalled anywhere east of Queen's Quay. Her chemises and suits were pressed and left in reserve in each closet. AAer she and Diana had finished unpacking the Lefebvre Collection and other accoutrements, it became obvious that the

cat hair and the clothes felt the need to be close.

1get nervous when 1 speculate about how women's fnendships work. 1 spent my second

year marginalized in a house of four women, and 1 obsewed in their relationships something of

a cross between sibling rivalry and the Cold War. My room was like Geneva. Occasionally, 1 would hear a late night bock on my door, which I kept closed to deter exactly that sort of thing.

In my four-cornered little Switzerland, intricate and tiresome conflicts were laid bare, The score sheets were tallied: someone had stolen someone else's bananas and had not returned them.

Someone had told the other two something confidential. Three had gone out and left the fourth behind, And so on. More often than no& I'd pu11 out a bottle of Teacher's and the parties would

Ieave the Geneva Conference drunk or unresotved or both. 1 suspect that fnendships and governments often work that way. Like with Stalin and Churchill.

A case in point: I'm writing this bit of my report tonight beneath Buddy Holly in the

Sole Café. Two women (La Salle undergrads by the paisley patches on the knees of theirjeans) take seats at the bar.

One's a blond. Hair as thick as honey. The kind that, I'm told, spreads luxuriantly on pillowcases. A body that unconsciously picks up the rhythm of nearby music. Tight Little butt.

Equine legs. The other is, predictably, a short-haired brunette who walks as though she's hauling an apple cart- This is my point: women seem to gravitate toward their opposites. In high schooI, the Weed Man coined a terrn for girls Iike this brunette or Diana. He called them "pretty girls' friends," or PGFs.

1 have often wondered how the PGFs feel about this parasitic reIationship, but there is no tactfiil way to ask a woman this. Wfiy would anyone want to put themselves in that position? A plain person jwctaposing themselves against someone else's beauty is like shining a flashlight in the sunlight. Then again, hadn't 1 been Mitchell Quist's fnend?

1 sit here amused- My table is an anthropological duck blind- These tasty pints of

Creemore ale are slowly fÙzzifj4ng my fine motor skills. I'm puzzled, too.

Al1 1 know is that these two women might be Diana and Claudia.

Diana called Claudia a "predator." Toronto-centric. A high-flying bitch. Diana was a

"beatnik." Gross. A paper-thin environmentalist. Then again, every Thursday night, Diana and

Claudia beat their swords into short skirts and went dancing at the Prickly Pear. They seldom skipped a week. * * *

1 picked up Mitchell Quist at Platform B. 1 was late for the rendezvous because of my senile, smurf-coloured 1982 Chevette. The IittIe arteries of the car, the vacuum lines, have tiny

Ieaks in them and need to be duct taped constantly. In warmer weather, the engine's heat melts the tape so that 1 have to cut a swatch of silver goo fiom my engine and patiently apply a fresh dressing.

It was Mrs. Kendall's phone cal1 that woke me up that day,

- Jeffery. HelIo. 1 was just phoning to remind you that you're to pick up your guest at the train station today.

1 could picture her, alone in her burrow in Trent Hall. The smell of cigarettes and coffee on her clothes and circles under her eyes suggesting a hangover. Her aloofhess, I've sometimes thought, could simply be fatigue caused by too many metabolic pushups: stimulant, depressant, stimulant, depressant.

I rolled over in bed and tried to squint the little luminescent nurnbers on my clock into existence. 9:47. The alarm was set for nine. My pillow was on it. There was a muffled beep.

The room had a smell of a taundry hamper filled with wet cabbage and melted brie cheese.

1 said that I knew al1 that, and was on rny way, practically. 1tried to tum off the alam.

My leftarm hadn't gotten its wake-up cal1 fiom rny brain yet. The pillow knocked a book by E.P.

Thompson into the waste basket, followed by a fi11 glass of water.

- So, um, Michael's getting here at 10:30, right? The beeping stopped on its own. 1 smacked my dry mouth, wishing I hadn't spilled the water but feeling no remorse over the damage it had done to the library's E.P Thompson.

Mrs- Kendall set me straight on Mitchell Quist's name and told me that he was aniving at 10:26. But she couldn't resist a dig:

- 1 suppose you were on top of everything, 1see. 1just thought that 1 might remind you.

- WeIl, E think that 1 rnight thank you, al! the same.

By the tirne I'd packed the last wad of duct tape into the Chevette's engine, it was just after 10:20. ***

1 can't have writer's block. This is autobiography. But 1 do. Where do I end and where does Mitchell Quist begin? Or is there a difference at all anymore? Maybe, to explain it all, 1 have to go even deeper into the past. To a time when 1 was, if not "myself," at least not a byproduct of Mitchell Quist. Was there ever such a time? He would Say no, that having a present means you are never fiee to read the past with your old eyes and words. It's like trying to peel your own experience away fiom words like "rnother" or "lover." You can't go back to a time when romance didn't have a face- or a shape or a specific texture. Almost no one wants to forget that. But neither can I scrutinize rny past without seeing where it has led to Mitchell Quist. That I knew him at al1 makes unremernberïng him impossible.

But 1'11 try.

My hand wants to stop writing. It's blue fiom pinky to -st where the ink has rubbed off the pages. As if it's starved for oxygen.

The blond 1 mentioned? The Sole is filling up, and she and her PGF want to sit at my table. I've had a lot to drink, so 1 like the idea of sitting with them. My handwriting won't be

Iegible later.

I've learned to think this:

If you write, write in a café. People assume you're deep because you7realone. And vice versa. A Touch Of Fire Chapter Two

There appeared, as 1 thought, a large blaze of Iight in the shape ofa circle, that side next to me open as though it yawned after me, and as it drew very nigh me, it closed up in a small cornpass, then broke away in small sparkles, and vanished away.

Excerpt from the Journal of Henry Alline.

I amived Iater than 1 had wanted, irritable and feeling fiowned upon by the building to boot- Like many La Salle landmarks, the train station takes itself seriously in a ponderous, limestone way. Four phallic columns adom the neocIassica1 entrante, but it smells incongruously of machine oil and taxi cab exhaust. It is a structure designed to withstand time, but not to adapt to change. There is no convenient nook for a bank machine and no parking lot for buses. There Ge green-white gobs of pigeon shit, like squeezed out acrylics, on Ottawa Sun boxes and window sills. It is inefficient and unprofitable, but it's the kind of building 1 like, though I'm never sure if it7sreally a structure in decline or if 1 make it so. Other people might not see what 1 do: that the station is a cranky old uncle, a bit smelly and gone in the head. And when he tells you that he was handsome in his youth, you want to believe hirn.

Inside, the walls are gaunt, supporting ceiling fiescoes of saints or Loyalists, it's hard tu Say which, since a hundred years of summer humidity has scarred their faces like a piaster pox. The important trains, those fiom Toronto and Montreal, arrive at commuter-fiiendly intervals-- moming, noon sharp and late aftemoon. Only at those times do voices and sounds of shuffling baggage boom around the station's shell, making it alive and beautiful again. A transient beauty like poor and ragged people have. They are radiant at a distance and fade as you near them on the Street, a reminder that you can't have min without having beauty first. That day, the walls to the right and left ofthe entrance were aglow with light shining through stained glass windows, shimmenng over vacant benches and rusted, incontinent radiators.

My footsteps echoed behind me, and 1 beat them to the c1erk's wicket. One man ran the whole station fkom a single desk it turned out. He was a little guy with a big, perspiring forehead. Mostly bald except in a few places where hair sprang up in clumps like a freshly seeded lawn. The -ViA rail uniforrn was typical, but his maroon sweater made the white knot in his tie stand out so much that he Iooked priestiy.

- Excuse me.

He ignored me, and continued shuffling some papers. 1 noticed a dark, insectoid rowing machine and some cast-iron free weights around the corner of a door behind him.

- Excuse me?

The clerk raised his head slowly and peered, unblinking, through dense glasses. They made his eyes look pinched and distant. 1 felt as though 1 was intruding on something important, something he was keeping inside the desk, perhaps.

- Yes, may 1 help you?

Counting the clerk, there were three of us in the station. A woman, (with green spiked hair and ears pierced so many times 1 had to wonder what they'd ever done to deserve such cruelty), sat reading a newspaper on a bench in a far corner. The empty taxi cabs were lined up like vultures outside, their drives leaning against the cab doors, smoking and talking through the din of a holf-dozen different radio stations. But at the moment, 1 was his only cIient. A rudely awakened, harried and pmpyclient.

- What time is the train fiom Québec due?

He was about to speak, but three rising tones began heralded the arriva1 of a train. In politician's tones, a taped voice announced the arrival of a train fiom Belleville, Oshawa,

Guildwood and Toronto. As the message repeated itself in French, the clerk stood at attention, as if it were the anthem, his arms stiff at his sides. When it ended, he continued:

- There was a derailment in Lennoxville this morning. Tanker cars leaking some damn chemical or another, so there's firemen and police al1 over the place trying to contain it and figure out what happened. Everything fiom the East's getting shunted around so many lines, predicting arrivals is like finding a string in a snake fm. If you ask me, six hour delay, minimum. Can't do nothing about it.

- Six hours? Are you sure?

The clerk swivelled his torso toward the arrival schedule. 1noticed that his neck, a thick hairy wedge as wide as his head, moved in tandem with his back. The only separation between the two was a single (ine like a smiley-face that opened and shut as he moved his head up and down. In a split second, thirty five years passed and his back humped and was covered with puffs of white as it shuttied through its routine. Soon the cleaning staff would find the body, slumped over one of the oars of the rowing machine with its foot caught in a stirrup like one of the unfortunates in Plato's AZZegory of the Cuve. The clerk shrugged heavily, the striations in his neck twitching for amoment before slackening into wattles, and he indicated the coffee machine beside me.

- Close as 1 can get 'er. You can sit and have yourself some java or go downtown for a few hours. The creases in his forehead deepened. He broke out in a rash of age spots.

1 tried to remember the last time 1 heard someone use the word "java" without irony in a sentence. 1 wondered why he assumed 1 was fiom out of town. Was I dressed funny? I wondered, too, what might constitute a "few hours" to this man and if he would live to see them. Suddenly, a sound like a flock of birds erupted fiom the other end of the station, prying my attention away. The platfonn entrance opened and about ten passengers and their entourage of echoes fluttered, squawking into the quiet. Most went directly for the front doors and the taxis, or to a bank of pay phones near the washrooms. One lmky young man in a University of

Toronto cap and collared shirt kissed the punker girl. 1 couIdnYttell if it was a rornantic kiss.

They departed together. A man in a suit put his briefcase on the counter between me and the clerk,

Which Ieft- her. ***

Writing al1 this down is going to be much harder than I thought.

I've decided to do some of my writing by day, when the Sole is less crowded and when

I'm less Iikely to drhk too much. The other night 1 wound up embarrassing myself in front of the bIond woman and her PGF. When the blond asked me what i was writing about, 1 droned:

- I'm not writing. t'm negotiating with absence and chaos. Throwing a hamess over history.

- O-kay, she said, making the word three syllables long by adding a rising question mark at the end. She threw her friend a look.

The PGF stole a glance at the last page.

- What's a PGF? she asked.

- Nothing. It's not important, 1 said, and shoved the folder into my knapsack.

The blond one questioned me.

- So, your story's pretty important, then?

It went downhill fiom there. First of ail, they were fiosh girls and new to La Salle. They hadn't heard of me. So, 1 started to tell them my story chronologically, beginning in Aftercliffe with the Weed Man and the Reverend. But, before 1could even get to Mitchell Quist, Diana and

Claudia, they had thanked me and moved on to another table. I watched them as they chatted with a group of guys their own age. Once, between the bodies in the bar, the PGF looked over me and smiled into her lap. The angle of her neck reminded me of the way flowers grow, heads curved into the stems until they open into the sun. By the time 1 lefi for home, however, my rnyth had asserted itself. She had withered, the bend of her neck a parody of youth, curving back into the ground silently and without resistance. Her meek submission made me angry and sad.

Probably the alcohol didn't help matters, but 1 have a feeling my story would have seemed bonngand foolish even had 1 been sober. Right about now, 1 could use Diana's insights on narration. She was sharp. She might suggest that my narrative take on a U-shaped, OId

Testament structure. Like in the book of Judges. Apostasy followed by a descent into bondage and sin followed by a rise to deliverance equal to the point where the narrative began. But she might just as well choose some funky contemporary critic over someone like Northrop Frye.

Diana knew a Iot about literary theory. It was in her field, after all. Intellectualiy, she would have liked how the two women from the Sole interacted with themselves in a textual way. Very postrnodern, she might Say, though her voice would have weariness around its edges. She liked hip thinkers like Spivak, Said and Derrida well enough, but could be impatient with interminable discussions of "subalternity" and ccculturalappropriation" among these critical theorists, whom she felt were too often too busy coining neologisms to read actual literature.

Diana was a traditionalist that way. Since I'm a traditionaIist, too, 1 like the idea of the U- shaped narrative better. That's an image that could stick in my head.

The part that's hardest is describing first impressions. When I first met Diana, 1 admit, 1thought she was just another floral-tea-slurping hippie chick. Hopefully, if I'm doing this righf that's how you imagine her, too. But, peeking through is the way that I later came to regard her.

As a formidable intellect. As a cornplex woman. And more. StiIl, while I'm not the same person 1 was before I met her (or Mitchell Quist or Claudia) and while 1 have to start the story near the end, I can't tell the whole thing backwards, either. It's important that you meet my fnends as 1 did. That you meet me as 1 was, too. Stay with me.

Or, rather, with the story. Which will resume (in my time) right afler Clarence gets done wiping down the express0 machine and sets my next mug of coffee on the Roger's Thesaunrs

I'm using as a coaster. For you, the story resumes now. With Claudia. ***

The middle of the station was empty. Behind me, the high priest of the train schedule was initiating a new supplicant. At the other end of the station, where a moving zodiac of dust twinkled in the red and yellow light fiom the stained glass window, was a blond woman with a sky-blue suitcase. She wore cutoff shorts showcasing a pair of marvellously toned legs. Over her shoulder, she camed a two-bladed wooden aircraft propeller. She was soldiering towards the front door, the cabbie-vultures and, unless 1 acted quickly, away fiom me forever.

Before she could get to the front door, 1 speed-shuffled to get there first.

- Allow me, I said, not letting my eyes appreciate anything but her as she nodded to me and thrust one blade of the propeller through the door. Twisting slightly, she tried to get the second blade through but instead beaned me across the bridge of my nose. 1 winced.

- Sorry. You didn't damage it, 1 hope.

1 pinched away the momentary facial throbbing and stared stupidly at her perfectly formed teeth and the little clouds of bright white on them, smitten utterly by her blue eyes and hi&, ever-so-lightly fkeckIed forehead,

- No, my head's fine.

When she fürrowed them, 1 noticed that her eyebrows were darker than her hair. She

said,

- 1 meant the prop, Shaggy I just had it Iacquered.

Although it probably took me a second, 1 Iaughed at the insult, but soon found myse1f

staring at her backside as she walked towards the taxis. Scooting, 1 caught up to her.

- So that's it? Smack and run? You know, you've protiably niined my budding movie

career with that thing. You could either apologize, or let me enjoy your Company for a while.

Maybe both. How about 1 Save you a couple of bucks and give you a lift to the air show, or

wherever it is you're going?

She stopped on the sidewalk and scanned me quickly.

- Do you usually pick up stray women in train stations, or are you just some supermarket

bag-boy polishing his skills in the off-season? 1'11 take a cab.

She resumed walking.

1 caught up to her again and pointed out that I was a student and had noticed that she, too, appeared to be a student and could probably use a ride and that 1 rneant nothing by it. Total bullshit, of course. 1 meant everything by it. 1 was making a welcome of hostility and was plotting which artist in my panoply of never-used libido music would best accompany an

infiltration of her shorts; the mystical peregrinations of early Van Morrison or the masculine heartbreak of Otis Redding. She struck me as the Otis type.

It didn7toccur to me at the time, but it does now. She never became any older than she was at that exact moment. My touch of fire seemed not to connect with her. The cheekbones stayed beneath the skin, the muscles in her arms and thighs moved like young loven under a bed

sheet Behind her, the path was erased, as if the eddies of her passing whisked away the train, the station, the doors. But it was also as if there was nothing ahead of her, or at least nothing that could be easily predicted. Random as the jet stream, high and swift.

She glanced away ftom me to the cabbies (one of whom had already thrown open his trunk and was staring, a pantomime of amusement, at the young women with the airplane part), and back at me again. The wind had picked up, greying the sky and tossing her hair about like whitecaps. Our absurd Iittle tableau lasted for another second or two.

- Oh, what the hell. It's a fkee ride, after all. The cabbie stopped smiling and slammed his trunk shut.

- Now there's a ringing endorsement. 1smiIed at her, hoping to plane away a few of the rough edges that had splintered our conversation.

- So long as we get three things straight, Shaggy. One: don't think I'm some kind of homeless bimbo that you're going to charm and coddle. Two: if you think you can innocently ask to show me around town and suavely ply my phone number out of me, forget it. And three: if, God forbid, you think that this Iittle favour is going to mean that you and i are going to find ourselves alone in your apartrnent, naked and sweaty, on some nameless night in the future with nothing but a bottle of Tequila between us, then 1'11 take the cab. That is, unless your car's a Jag.

The cabbie opened the tnink again.

- It's an '82 Chevette. Looks like a mickey of leftover Blue Curaçao. Are you trying to read my mind?

- No, but believe me when I Say that there are very few men in this world that surprise me. It's not their minds I'm reading. She dropped her handbag and stuck out her left hand. - I'm Claudia. I'm starting my MBA at La Salle. She pronounced her name "Cloud-ia",

like an heiress or a designer clothing maven fiom Milan,

The cabbie closed his trunk for the last time.

1 shook her hand awkwardly with my left.

- I'rn Jeffery, and I'rn a grad student in history. Anyone ever tell you you're witty?

- Often. Probably as often as people give you fashion advice.

- Nobody does that.

- They should start. She ran her hand through her hair, flipping it fiom one side to

another. A slight, mesmerizing motion that lefi me stunned.

Without waiting for help, she scooped up the se-blue bag. Feeling as though I'd never

be able to catch up to her in conversation, I led Claudia toward my car. She leaned against the

minivan beside us whiIe 1 fished around under the driver's seat for a screwdriver. It's the only

way to pop the tmnk latch. There had been a keyhole in it a few months before, but it had rusted

itself into uselessness and needed to be removed like a twnour. Fitting the propeller into the trunk wasn't easy, but after I'd moved the empty beer case over and stacked the naked speakers on top of it, 1 had just enough room to Lay the prop in diagonally, one end under the passenger's dashboard and the other in the h-unk cavity. The wood was light and the new lacquer felt like g!ass under my fingers.

1 closed the hatch and glimpsed a reflection of the two of us. 1 took stock of the situation. Claudia: ethereal, otherworidly for reasons already explained. Myself: the kind of face that people always think is two years older than it is, broad and pale with premature crow's feet fiom chain-smoking. Chin: unshaven, the patches of longish hair dangling in a random pattern, like jellyfish tentacles. Hair: a matted red tangle that made me look like a Scots shepherd afier a fortnight spent among the flocks and the heather. Mouth: lips that were thin like pipe cleaners and a slight chip in the fiont tooth, which, if I feel charitable, could be said to add character. And 1 was sure that either the window or my shirt was distorti& rny slight paunch. It looked as if Claudia were taller than me, which 1 was sure was not the case.

She settled in, and my gaze landed on her legs again. If she noticed the quick glance, she didn't say anything. No less perfect close up, there was not one wisp of haïr on her legs, which were angled away fiom the prop between us and shining with heat. A photographer could not have airbrushed them cleaner. She seerned new. Yet, I knew that I was not the first man to stare at her like Humbert Humbert spying on Lolita. Or the first man to hit on her outright, though perhaps the clumsiest Her diatribe about the tequila bottle proved as much, 1 thought.

It had the recitative quality of a well travelled monologue given at Rotary and Optimists C 1ub gatherings. 1 wondered about the previous victims of her hurricane wit, whether they had persisted after her or if they simply slunk away, battered. Perhaps it was her unattainability, her body's refusal to stay put in time that led men to desire her. It would not have surprised me. I found myself thinking about her.

That was surprising. 1 felt desire like a car engine's instant ignition after winter storage.

I had not felt that way in six years. My relationship with Rochelle hadn't been passionate; I'd dated her only because she seemed so determined to corne to my rescue. As if I were a deteriorating painting. I hadn't felt sexual desire since the waitress Randa Keller, though my infatuation with her probably represented the victory of adolescent hormones over my touch of fire and not, as was the case now, the subjugation of my own rnyth by a more powerful one: the lure of the Permanent Present embodied in Claudia Lefebvre.

I'm tempted to lie and tell you that she eventualty fell prey to my charm and wound up wiggling appreciatively under my body, In one ofthose hotels, perhaps, where everything fiom

the headboard to the television remote is bolted dom. That only happened (then and repeatedly

afierwards, I'm honest enough to admit) in my rnind. Tmth is, when asked anything, she replied

with truncated answers that satisfied the questions but garrotted the conversation. Even the

propeller (could you ask for a better conversation starter?) only told me that she was a part-time

pilot. I'd Say her scent was subtle- of petals and aloe, but that's just narrative licence and nùt

history. More likely, her scent came hminside a glass display counter at a swanky Toronto

boutique, That would have been her style.

What happened was that I drove her home, The car turned impotent at every

intersection. As if for the first time, my nervous senses detected layers of nicotine filth on the

windshieid and every untimely crinkle of a spent Doritos bag under the clutch pedal. Through this, Claudia perched in the vinyl bucket seat beside me with face and eyes forward, knees together, haïr tucked over her left ear. Breasts that symbolized menace, not nurture or sex.

As 1 said, I dont recall anything significant in the ride to her harbour-view apartment above the PrickIy Pear dance bar. Except that, not once, not even when she eventuaIly thanked me, did she smile. * * *

Later, Mitchell Quist would Say how much he loved Claudia's smile.

- She has the kind of smile you see on the faces of kids who run as fast as they can down grassy hills in the surnmer with their arms out to catch the wind. When they drop to the ground, sweating, panting and out of breath, that's Claudia's smile. A Touch of Fire Chapter Three

O what snares were these fiolicks and young company to my sou1... O let al1 that love their own souls fiee, flee hm carnal pleasure, and young carnal company, as they would fiom eternal misery; for it is poison to the soul, as ratsbane to the body.

From the Journal of Henry AIIine.

Recently, a demographet calculated that the dead on this planet outnumber the living by

a factor of fourteen to one. So, by my reckoning, the currently alive are only seven percent of

al1 the people who have ever lived. If Empedocles was right and the souls of sinners wander for thirty thousand seasons through the souls of others, then al1 of us were darnned long before we were born. Combine the Greeks and a littie modem number crunching and you corne up with

Calvinism. Unacceptable, 1 Say. Forced to choose between the only two eternal possibilities- that everything we do matters or that nothing we do rnatters, 1 know which 1 would select, but my opinion probably doesn't count, Mitchell Quist might say that human choice and Ianguage are everything. But 1 would Say that our words are as cosmically insignificant as humanity itself.

Which is one thing Mitchell Quist and 1 never agreed upon. He thought people were pretty important.

Even he might have to admit that, ultimately, the universe speaks to itself, not to us, and that it does so in its own time. ***

Mitchell Quist and 1 were debating again, a few nights afier we'd first begun talking about the soul. He had just read a book that claimed there was "no philosophical or scientific grounds for accepting the existence of immortal mental substances." Although he thought the author hadn't thought through his position properly, 1 disagreed:

-No one believes in a soul except on religious grounds. The thing's the cultural product

ofthe only creatures on the planet who have to live, daily, with the conscious knowledge of their

own mortality but are expected to behave as though they had no clue- Sure, most societies

believe in etemity, but whereysthe empirical evidence? Your idea of a soul sounds more like

caioric to me: an explanation rooted in fancifùl thinking.

I pulled an especially long drag from my cigarette, and watched as the smoke was

swallowed by the tabletop candle. 1 hoped that Mitchell Quist didn't know Lavoisier's caloric

theory regarding the heat caused by friction. Lavoisier postulated that caloric was a warm,

invisible liquid contained in al1 atoms which would be released and transferred when objects

were rubbed together. Before Marat had him executed by guillotine, the chemist had hired a

bright-eyed pupil, Irenée du Pont, at his gunpowder factory. After Lavoisier's execution, the du

Ponts fled to America and started their own black-powder factory at the request of Thomas

Jefferson. Just last year, the du Pont corporation donated several million dollars toward the construction of a physiotherapy wing at the hospital here in La Salle which treats, among other things, adult obesity. There, cccaloric"means something else, though it's still related (through

language and historical cause/effect) to burning. Personally, I side with Empedocles, who said that fire was in al1 material objects (including people) and was just waiting for an excuse to get out. I did not Say this to Mitchell Quist. 1 didn't want him to know that my reasons for disagreeing with the notion of the soul had more to do with my own arcane beliefs than with empiricism.

- What do people do before they die? he asked.

The question took me aback. - That varies, doesn't it? People die in al1 kinds of ways.

- 1'11 rephrase the question- what do people do if they see death coming?

The owners of the café had placed Marilyn Monroe's picture beside that of Buddy Holiy.

The one of her on top of the grate with her skirt billowing. I poked her flat image with my index finger.

- If you're Marilyn, you unscrew the cap. After you screw the Kennedys.

- Don't be so flippant.

- It's true, Marilyn wasn't exactly Simone De Beauvoir,

- You can't answer my question because you haven't thought enough of it, Jefie.

- You don't know me ver-well.

- You miss the point. It's not that you haven't thought of it enough, but that you haven't thought enough of it.

- I think of it al1 the time.

- You've thought about it one time. You've just stretched that single thought over a decade.

- Ridiculous, 1 said, glancing out the window. There was a young man reading a novel on the patio. He was just beginning to unfold his bifocals and had put his dentures in a glass of water. The novel yellowed, the spine broke open and pages were carried aloi3 by a cool updraft, each one bursting into flame and rolling, fluttering back to earth Iike buming snow. * * *

A decade ago, the Reverend Bruce MacArthur tried unsuccessfulIy to sel1 one of the last great land yachts of the mid-seventies. He took it to old Eddie McKnight of McKnight Motors, or "Fast Eddie," rather predictably, to the locals. Fast Eddie's real last name was Fijalkowski (or sorne other consonant-barnacled Eastern European name, 1 forget), but in tnith, few peopIe

in my Little Southem Ontario shit-and-tractor tires farm town would have done business with

someone so obviously Slavic and possibly Jewish, so he'd taken the name of the dealership's

former owner. Changing his surname didn't fool anyone, really. But he was shrewd and

successful, and had purchased his identity fair and square. Afterclifle WASPs respected this,

and pretended to see a biscuit-tin Scolman beneath his comrnunist-built steam shovel face and grey hair, which he slicked back with enough Brylcream to drown a whole family of sea-otters.

The Reverend had haggled and bantered with Eddie for an hour, trying to use the old Caprice as a trade-in on a new four- cylinder Pontiac. Fast Eddie didn't want it. The debate had ended with his gloves beating against the sides of his tweed overcoat from Harrod's, his words suspended in coId steam.

- Reverend, 1 can't do no more for you, rny fiend. 1 wish to God 1 cocild, but you ask too much. One hundred dollars to a big-time minister like you is nothing. He nudged the

Reverend jovially with an elbow.

- To me it is food for my family. i've got to send my boy to college, my fiiend.

In the end, the Reverend MacArthur had to keep his Caprice for the sake of Eddie's family. Eddie promised to attend the Reverend's Church, St. James Presbyterian. He also slashed two hundred off the agreed price as he was writing up the bill, just to tub it in.

- 1 wou1dn7twant to offend the AAC, yoü know, he said, winking.

The Reverend ignored this. The Aftercliffe Action Cornmittee had folded years ago, and

Fast Eddie knew it. The AAC was not something the Reverend Iiked to talk about. He had his reasons. So, by the time he drove away in his new '84 Sunbird, (with me following behind in the Caprice), the Reverend was beginning to regret dealing with Eddie. Twice spurned, the Caprice sat in the driveway for six months. Flaky mst pastries baked

in the seams of both doors when spring and summer came. Rather than pay the insurance, the

Reverend turned the dying monster over to me, though he kept a set of keys for himself.

Old as it was, the Caprice gave me the fieedom to blaze heedlessly around Aftercliffe with my fnends, fish-tailing on side-roads with a plume of Mount St. Helens-style grave1 and dust ping-pinging off the chrome back bumper. Some days it could be seen prowling at a crawl dom Main Street, a short ride that started at the Queen's Hotel and ended at the farmer's Co-

Op. A few times, it got us al1 the way to Hamilton or Welland. Presumably, that was where the action was, though we never found any and probably wouldn't have recognized it if we had.

1 suppose I was having the time of my life. 1 hadn't yet been kicked out of the

Reverend's house, I worked part-time selIing apples at the Aftercliffe farmer's market. It wasn't a bad job, and sometimes, when 1 get sentimentally drunk, 1 imagine a future where 1 am an apple farmer, pruning limbs and pressing cider. But 1 don't know the first thing about fruit farming. I'd never actually worked on the farrn, but used to meet my boss at the market. He paid well for a single Saturday's work, enough to give me a decent social Me if my friends agreed to share gas costs. I had a curfew, but the Reverend enforced it only periodically. When he did insist on my being home on time, it was only because my mother was staging a show of familial solidarity for visiting relatives. Luckily, most of them were still in Scotland. Only my

Mother's unmarried brother Gus lived in Canada, though he worked for Petrocan up in the

Territories and the few times he came, he didn't stay long.

1 had friends. 1 had the Caprice. And, though 1 had already watched as one or two people succumbed to the touch of fire, 1 considered it an isolated, fieakish phenomenon. But mostly, 1 simply wanted to get out of that town, out of the Reverend's house. And not in the ordinary smaII-town-boy-drawn-to-the-lights-of-the-big-cityway, either- The Reverend and I spoke only to avoid fürther conversation (pas me the cereal when you're done with it) or when mediated through rny mother, who became reduced in our family to her role as go-between.

Except for school and mandatory Sunday church attendance, my time was disposable.

1 spent as much of it in my car as 1could. From behind the steering wheeI, the world was made of road. Avoidance and nomadism. It beat the silence between the Reverend and me and the attempts at reconciliation made by my mother, which becarne increasingly perfiinctory as the years went on. 1entertained the idea of pointing the car West to Vancouver Island where my big brother, Ian, was already living. But 1 never had quite enough money or the kind of courage you need to start fiom scratch, 1 settled on biding my time until university. Practising for the day when I'd point the car down the road and not corne back. Although 1 didn't see it at the time, my fiends knew the Caprice's symbolic value. They decided that it should have a name. * * *

1 chal Ienged Mitchell Quist:

- So, do things have souk? Like this pint glass here?

- It might have, once. He took a swig fiom his dark ale.

- And you Say that I'm evasive.

- WelI, you are evasive. Not to me so rnuch, but you certainly manage to lose yourself sometimes.

- Quit it. Now you're just pissing me off.

MitcheII Quist sat back in his chair and shoved off fiom the table. He did this when he was about to make an elaborate point. Like his ideas needed more space.

- Okay. Imagine a technology like nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, onIy more sophisticated. A device capable of determining the composition of a human being right down to the atomic level. Now, Jefie, imagine a duplicate of yourself assembled, atom by atom, so that it would be completely identical to you.

- Star Trek. I could introduce you to an old fnend of mine who's a big fan. Even he would tell you that what you're talking about isn't possible, so 1 don't see much point in even discussing it, I sniffed.

- Of course it isn't possible. It's a philosophical exercise. The point is that this duplicate self would have everything you have: features, ideas, mernories. Yet it would exist somewhere else spatially so that your consciousness and his would not be the same. If we instantaneously destroyed the original Jefie, and let the duplicate occupy the same space at the time of your destruction, and if quantum physics is correct that idemtical particles are absolutely identical, then you shouldn't notice your own destruction. But you would, wouldn't you? "You" would cease to exist. And if it's not physical content, mernories and spatial location, then what is it that makes you?

I thought about this for a moment.

- But what you're really talking about is conscÜousness. You're not talking about the soul.

- In a way, 1 am. It is precisely because we can't identie ourselves by attributes or ideas or thought that we know that the ineffable exists. Consciousness is one exampIe. But why would the existence of the ineffable depend on consciousness to exist, when consciousness itself is non-corporeal?

- You're back to the same old argument. Negation doesn't prove anything. It's a tautology. - It's al1 about being able to put your life into words, and yet recognizing that the failure

to put it into words negates nothing essential. As Knsha says to A rjuna in the Bhagmad Gitu:

"I have been bom many tirnes, Jefie, and many times hast thou been bom. But 1 remember my

past lives and thou hast forgotten thine."

- And you Say you know me? That's a laugh.

- Before they die, Jefie, a lot of people try to put things right. Adjust their karma, make

peace with God, whatever. Why ask for forgiveness if it doesn't matter?

- There's repentance and then there's regret. They are not the same thing, 1 said, and

drained my pint.

1 remember my past lives well enough. But they are past lives I've had in my present

body. 1 don? choose to think about them. There are things that I regret, though at the time they

seemed safe enough. i've never asked for forgiveness for my actions because the List of people

(let alone deities) who would have to be appeased is simply too long. Like what I once did with

someone in a car on a dirt road, for instance. ***

The Caprice was christened one evening while we took a break fiom drunken gravel- running near the Haldimand/Niagaracounty line. It was a cool August night. Frank (Fencepost)

Postma, Ray (the Weed Man) Dunlop and I raised Our heads tentatively aRer the headlights had passed, and peered through the back window into the moonlit road beyond the farm gate. We were parked in a small laneway into a pasture, just bzside a potholed and Me-used Concession road.

- Mounds of Paradise! exclaimed the Weed Man.

-Ya think that was a cop, JeEe? Ya think that was an Oh-Pee-Pee or a Regional, Jefie? The Weed Man rolled up a zip-lock lunch baggie and stuffed it into rny glove compartment.

- 'Cause if its a cop we're toast. Oh man, oh man- are we ever burnt on the bottom, stick to the roof of your mouth toast. 1 think it'd be a possession charge and a fie-three dollar fine, he added, knowingly.

The Weed Man was a littie paranoid, as were we aII. He'd been given a dash of lefiover homegrown by his neighbour, Herman, a guy who hunted fiogs with a bow and arrow in his spare time. We had rolled half of the shake into a fat Iittle stogie, and washed it down with

Labatt's Blue, the beer with the then-new twist-off cap. Between Postrna's house on the Byng

Road and the Ianeway, Fencepost had made me stop the car a half a dozen times so he could set out empty bottles on the yellow median lines. With each one placed he said:

- The Troops were here-

Through the rear view rnirror 1 could see that Fencepost's white seed-cap was a faint brassy cofour in the moonlight.

-And this is the Reverend's car, too, General! Mounds of Paradise! exclaimed the Weed

Man.

1was Fencepost's junior by a half-year and the Weed Man's by three. Weed was taIl and thin with cornstalk arms and Iegs. He looked like one of those rubber toys they hand out in kids' meaIs at fast food restaurants, the dolls with the pliable metal spine inside. At that time, he wore his hair in a crew cut because his nickname didn't entirely stem from his fondness for drugs, though pot and Star Trek novels went wherever he went. When he was younger, his mother had been his barber. She hadn't been very good at it, and had hacked his hair into tiers. Someone noticed his similarity to a tossed salad, and the name evolved from there. He developed a taste for dope in his late teens, but it was a case of Weed growing into his nickname rather than the

other way around.

Fifteen or so plaid-wearing thugs who closely matched his description could be found

lounging around near Stedmanfsdepartment store in Aftercliffe on a weeknight, but there was

only one Weed Man, perpetually suspended, caretess, on the bnnk of manhood. In a week's time he was moving out of his mom's basement into an apartment near the Queen's Hotel. We were ceIebrating. 1 was going on to university next month, which was another reason we were on this last road mission together. Weed was stuck on the idea that the passing car had been a cruiser.

- Weed, if that had been a cop, we would have seen his cherries by now. He's Iikelyjust some farmer thatfs been down at the Fenwick Bistro. Right now, he's trying to think up stories to tell his big square wife when he gets to his big square farmhouse,

- Cherries. 1 forgot. I... am... so stoned! Weed giggled as he patted around the glove compartment for the rest of the bag.

- Besides, it's my car now, not the Reverend's.

Fencepost cackled like a macaw at that, abniptly breaking into the conversation from the back seat.

- 1 guess the Reverend's never smoked up in here before, eh, General?

Frank Postma's one profound intellectuai accomplishment was that he had read most of the captions on the pictures in the The-Life World War Ii series at the Aftercliffe Public

Library. Like a lot of kids in the area sporting his height and build, he was Dutch Reformed.

Because his parents had lived through World War II, he'd taken a special interest in it. One day,

(when al1 his planets were aligned and the gods had decided to illuminate his darkness) he'd called me "General MacArthur" and the name had shick, making these two my "Troops-"

For high school students like us, life in Aftercliffe presented two choices: plan your

escape or decorate the prison. I'd long ago made the former choice, while Fencepost and Weed

made the latter. 1 felt sorry for their choice, but admired their creativity. The way that they

renamed local Iandmarks, for example, was inspired. "Stedman's" became "DeadmanYs." The

"Toronto-Hamilton-Buffalo" (TH&B) railroad became the "To-Hell-and-Back" railroad. As

tirne went on, Fencepost and Weed went beyond merely painting the scenery, and turned

Aftercliffe's citizens into characters in high dramas. Once, while we were sitting in the

Aftercliffe Sub Shop, the Mayor walked in. Sotto voce, the Weed Man observed:

- Mayor Hagan uses the library budget as his own private slush fund, you know.

- Get out, 1 replied. Mayor Hagan was a local turkey famer and politician. He was a

nice man and popular with pretty much everyone but the Reverend, who thought he was a

bumpkin and a liar.

- It's true. He got in too deep with a couple of gangsters from Hamilton a few years

back, right Weed? A Guy named Jimmy (the Club) Rappatoni, Fencepost added.

- Yeah, that's why the mayor limps. Jimmy took out his knee.

- 1 thought that was an accident with a seed auger, 1 said.

- That's what he wants you to think.

The two of them had me suckered for a while, 1admit. 1joined in on a few occasions,

but 1 never did so wholeheartedly. There was something desperate and sad about their game.

As if it wasn7tabout re-creation and invention so much as resignation. To play the game

properly, you needed to be the kind of person who would never leave town. This exempted me,

but it applied to Frank, and probably Weed too. Frank himed the discussion back to my ownership of the Caprice. He liked cars and had

fixed mine on several occasions already.

-You know, we really ought to christen this old battleship, just like in The War, he said.

He rneant World War II, of course.

We cast ideas around for a while. Weed wanted to cal1 it the "YeIlow Submarine," which made no sense except that it was the Song that had been playing over the AC Delco AM radio. Fencepost wanted to cal1 it the Iowa,the battleship upon which he claimed the Iapanese surrender had been signed. 1 said it was the Mr'ssouri. A debate ensued.

- Wait, wait, Jefie, Weed intempted as Frank and I began to move from The War to ethnic slurs. He had to holler to get my attention, though Frank kept talking over him.

-Shut up for a sec. Now, what do you really want out of this car?

1 thought for a while, wondering where the Weed Man was hying to lead me, my pot- hyped brain hectic.

- Beer! Fuckin' case of beer! Frank whooped, forgetting the debate and bouncing on the creaking back seat. For Frank, and most of Aftercliffe, the plural of "beer" was always "beer."

- Better gas milage? 1 offered, and cuffied Fencepost.

- Shut up, wooden-head.

- No. God, MacArthur, take this seriously. Weed's face becarne beatific as he turneci, pupils dilated in the moonlight, to face me. Somewhere in the dashboard, a tiny Bruce

Springsteen was playing in wh~tsounded like a kazoo band. The top of the dash thumped approvingly to the beat of "Glory Days," stimng up dust through the speaker holes. A single word formed on The Weed Man's lips:

- Ass. - Ass? You want me to cal1 my car 'Ass'? Good one, Weed. 1 can see it now:

"Reverend, 1'11 be back in a bit, I'm just taking my Ass for a spin."

Frank snorted into his beer bottle, liked the sound of it, and did it again.

- No. You're seventeen and a virgin yet.

- Yeah, so? Isn't everyone?

Fencepost and Weed laughed.

- Protestants. You're al1 so prudish. And naive. Ifyou were Catholic, the rumours about you would already be circulating.

- You know, I do hang out with you two an awfül lot.

- Hey, said Fencepost, to me.

- And We Dutch guys aren't prudent or naive, he added, for the Weed Man's benefit.

- No, your family trees don't even fork, do they Postma? He hit me over the head with his cap.

The Weed Man ignored us.

- Before you go away to college, women are the territory that you, General MacArthur, need to conquer. To lay claim to, so to speak.

- Amen, said Fencepost.

- 1 donTtknow. Maybe 1'11 just find someone in La Salle, 1 said.

- No. It has to be someone fiom Aftercliffe and it has to be soon, said the Weed Man.

- Why? What do you care?

- Oh, we care. We look out for you, General, said Fencepost.

The way he said it creeped me out.

- Pl1 pass, 1 said, firmly, intending it to be the end of the discussion. The Weed Man Iaughed.

- Sorry. it's too late. It's already decided. Written in the stars, so to speak. We're not

going to let you leave town without leaving a Iittle bit of yourself behind. Besides which, you

won? find girls like the ones in Afiercliffe anywhere else.

That was true enough. Aftercliffe girls sported attitudes most would associate with

construction or steel workers. They thought nothing of catcalling and yelling obscenities at guys

on Main Street. Like the one time Frank and 1 walked past a group of girls in front of the Sub

Shop in broad daylight. They were al1 smoking and wearing plaid hunting or "stoner" jackets of

various colours.

- Hey, baby, one of them called out to Frank.

- Corne on over here and show my fiiend Barbie here why they cal1 you Fencepost! And bring your IittIe General, too. They al1 howled.

We didn't have much to Say to that. It was something in the posture-- the hand on the hip, the cigarette stubbed out under the workboot, the sneer. Had they been guys, they would have been spoiling for a fight. Maybe that's what they were doirig, anyway. The girls were every bit as bored and fed up with small town life as we were, and filled with a kind of loathing for the lirnited choices Aftercliffe presented. Loathing for us, in other words.

When Fencepost and Weed started talking about their sexual conquests (like the ménage a trais they claimed to have had with a girl fkom Frank's church, for example) 1 imagined them screwing with hoilow-eyed stares. As if they were using sex to leave town, or make it interesting, if only for a moment of two. But I never said this out loud. Instead, 1joined my fiiends in a round of bawdy conjecture about various Aftercliffe girls.

Eventually, the name that we settled upon for the Caprice, (which, fiom inside the stale gray cloud of pot smoke sounded prew good) was "Tailgate." As the Weed Man explained, this was a vaguely suggestive name, but it could still be used in front of the Reverend.

In the end, we three spilled out of the car's two bank vault doors and, with the doughy clay pasture rnud sticking to our feet Iike second soles, we leaned and siipped our way to the front bumper. Frank held the last fui1 bottle of Labatt's Blue in one waving hand and passed it like a relay baton to me.

- It's your ship, General.

The other two bowed their heads under the gravity of the moment and 1 felt, suddenIy, as though 1 had been called upon to give a eulogy. Fencepost had removed his cap and the Weed

Man got suitably sombre. 1 knew a command performance when 1 saw one. Teenaged boys have a carrier wave which invisibly delivers messages of expectation and response. We called it "Succumbing to Peer Pasture," and Iaughed whenever adults got al1 serious about Our conformist social behaviour, which, if they ever stopped to think of it, wasn't that different from wearing suits to work or cooing over a colleague's ugly baby. Our social rituals were just more raw and obvious.

1 felt as though 1 owed Frank and Ray something mernorable tonight, since we'd been fiiends for years. And they'd never tned to get personal or deep with me, which 1 liked. Once

1 got to La Salle, 1 knew our fiiendship would change, if it continued at all. So, looking into the bright moon, 1 summoned my father's baritone preaching voice from my rib cage:

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy car. My will be done in the front seat as well as the back ...

The Troops giggled towards the field, but 1 continued, gathering steam. Give us this day Our daily tart and allow us to sin with impunity with someone else, preferably..,

(The Troops snickered, implicated.)

Find me some temptation, deliver me some evil, for Thine is the tailpipe and the power windows, and the manifold for kilometres and kilometres ...

- Amen, chomsed the Troops, The Weed Man crossed himself. He looked up in time to see me swing the bottle by the neck at the bumper. As I remember it, 1 had temporarily blinded myself by staring up at the fiill moon during the ceremony. Instead of the bumper, the beer bottle found the headlight.

There was a quicktinkling sound, ominous and guilty like a broken vase. The beer bottle shattered. The car's eyeball shattered, and 1 was aware that my hand was warrn and sticky.

Nearby, Fencepost threw up on his shoes.

At breakfast the next morning 1 had to explain to the Reverend, using the simplest lie that 1 could fashion, why 1 had been out past four in the morning and had returned with six stitches in my hand and a ha&-blind car.

- A bird flew straight into the grill, Reverend. I had to pick her guts out ofthe headlight and 1 guess 1 cut my hand.

The Reverend, (sixty years old then, six-foot-five and a stronger physical specimen than

1 would ever be) tumed his back, and made a noise into his beard Iike a fumace igniting: a kind of gaseous "harumph" sound. He poured himself some more tea. In the background, my mother was playing the Angus Dei fiom Fauré's Requiem on her stereo while she searched around the kitchen for sorne raisin bread to set down between us.

If you pray, be carefùl what you pray for. Two weeks later, Country Tyrne Donut waitress Randa Keller helped the car Iive up to its christening. ***

Was 1a "bad" teenager? I suppose that, if you quizzed the patrons here at the Sole, most would admit to post-adolescent guilt. Very few people live through those years without accumulating a debt of some kind. An injury to a fiend. A slurred speech performed whiIe standing on the back of a floral pnnt couch at a house Party. A wish to have been more forceful, more kind, less judgmental- always more or less of something.

1 don't have conventional regrets. WhiIe I think that teenaged boys number among the most odioiis of animals, you might as well rage against the violence of alligators as fault teenagers for being prunent or obnoxious. Relative to the rest of the species, 1 was low-key adolescent. Early on, I'd Wied to minimize contact, to Iimit my effect on the town and vice- versa. I was always preparing to leave. So 1don? have to regret much of my behaviour.

Except for how I did leave town, which didn't happen quietly, Iike tydplanned.

If Aftercliffe is Iike a past life, then remembering it is important. But I don't want to remember it or write it just now, Mitchell Quist's advice notwithstanding.

It's worth mentioning that, in the Gita, the reason Krishna wants Ajuna to remember his past lives is so that Ajuna won't hesitate to kilI people. Arjuna's former teacher, Drona, and a host of his fnends and family are aligned against him in battle. Arjuna wants to walk awsy, but Krishna assures him that the dead will be reborn, so destroying them is actually a noble gesture.

Right now I could really use another pack of DuMaurier's. I'm down to my last smoke- Afier I dropped Claudia off at her apartment, 1 drove back to my place for a few hours to read and wait for Mitchell Quist. The book was some yawner put out by La Salle Press about the labour movement in Canada. The central question was: "is there a Canadian working class, really?" 1 already knew the answer. The reason 1 had entered the academy was because the working class was, (as the old joke goes), revolting.

1 dont know what Fencepost and the Weed Man have done with the rest of their lives.

I hope for Fencepost's sake he's repairing tanks on a Canadian Forces base sornewhere and for

Weed's that he hasn't changed one bit. But i'11 bet that, wherever they are, they're not fomenting revolution in ARercliffe-

Marxists would Say that's just false consciousness. The working class really want to

Storm Queen's Park with sacks of doorknobs, but have been duped by corporate capitalism to want consumer goods instead. Wishfid thinking, 1 say. And hard to disprove.

Inasmuch as I dont believe in God, 1 dont believe in Marx either, though his followers in the History department keep trying to proselytize me. While their Jehovah's Witness-style tenacity troubles me, I admire their eschatology. Anyone who thinks that utopia is possible and socially desirable intrigues me. Like Henry Alline, who described his conversion to his New

Light Christianity this way:

... My whole sou1 was filled with love and ravished with a divine ecstasy beyond any doubts or fears ... for 1enjoyed a heaven on earth, and it seemed as if 1were wrapped up in God.

The difference between Marxists and Alline is that the Nova Scotia preacher thought he'd achieved heaven on earth. Marxists are still waiting. This both amuses and bores me. So

I did what I usually do when 1 read Mancist histories. 1 fell asleep. Randa Keller was a plump-bottomed grade eleven student at Aftercliffe High who worked two nights a week at Country Tyme Donuts. There was a strong subculture in and around the donut shops. It' s where al1 the tradesmen took their breaks on in-town jobs, but it was also the social headquarters for both retired famers and gangs of teenagers. The Weed

Man, who had a surprisingly sharp eye for fashion, called the convergence of the three social groups the ccAftercliffeFlamel Festival." Local boys went into trades right out of high school because it seemed Iike the most natural thing; neither their social habits nor their clothing would have to change much. As a result, edible oil products were a thriving industry. Locally, one joke was that Aftercliffe had more donut shops than retail stores which, sadly enough for the local economy, was nearly true. The second joke unflatteringly compared the donut store girls to the donuts.

Long before the donut-girl jokes had any immediate meaning for me, i'd admired Randa

Keller fiom across a cigarette scarred marigold formica island. The Troops and I used to buy our coffee on Wednesdays and Thursdays just to watch her work, her buttocks flicking suggestively back and forth beneath a wax-paper thin Cotton uniform. But there was no approaching Randa

Keller. Probably, that was what 1 liked about her.

As the Weed Man noted, when she wore that uniform, she seemed Iike a rnember of

Starfieet. As though she was abiding by some Country Tyme prime directive of non-interference in the sex lives of patrons-

One the, the Weed Man had held on to his empty mug as she tried to clear it away.

- Randa, 1 wouId do you in a second, he said.

Prying his fingers out of the mug's ear she said: - Gee, Ray, think you could hold out that long?

Fencepost and 1 had to give that one a standing ovation. She smiled and gave a little bow. But that's as close as !came to getting her attention for a while. But I eventually met

Randa Keller out of uniform the surnmer before my first year of universisr. ***

The pig roast is a little understood country tradition-- it's not the bloodthirsty bacchanal it's made out to be by city folk. The' pig roast, properly considered, is a rite of celebration marking the beginning of the harvest. One takes one's best pig and, after killing it in the traditional way (a slit across the throat, mafia-style), the pig is disembowelled and thmst upon a spit over an open pit barbecue. You can always tell when a pig roast is happening. Lines of cars will suddenly appear parked, listing into the ditches of barren concessions. The countryside smells, not coincidentalty, like giant out-of-doors greasy-spoon restaurant.

Quite possibly, if more srnail Southem Ontario toms had dance clubs or movie theatres, the pig roast might not be such a common event. But it is. It's also, as I discovered two years ago while attending a conference with Morris BIijver at Notre Dame University, a much celebrated event in "Michiana," the liminal zone between Michigan and Indiana. I pointed this out to Morris, to make chit-chat, and he mused for a good half an hour about a possible anthropological study. Something having to do with a cross-cultural comparison to Metanesian feasting, perhaps.

This particular late-summer festival was at the home of Wally Horton, a classmate of mine who spent his time assembling cars in the shop wing when he wasn't watching the dock in the detention room. He was also the Aftercliffe Muskies' best centre and was bound for the

Ontario Hockey League that season. There was a suspicion that he might make the %HL someday and fidfill Afiercliffie's collective craving for a bona fide local celebrity, since the

nearby towns ofFenwick and Selkirkeach had one famous athlete. But the gummers and gaffers

at Country Tyme, who were the town's hockey sages, aII said that WaIly needed to "bulk up"

to really make it big. Each had his own idea of a diet and exercise program to help him out, though most of the plans were variations on the "meat and potatoes and hay baling" theme.

WaIly was towering and muscuiar, but his face had a spongy, baby-fat quality to it, as

if he had a layer of water between his skull and his skin. He Iooked piggish.

When the Troops and 1 parked Tailgate near Wally's ditch, the party was well under way and proceeding normally. The hired hand, fifieen year old HeIena Twohey, had locked herself in the bathroom when she discovered that the guest of honour (now spinning stiff-hoofed on the rotisserie) was none other than her own hand-fed pig Orville. This, believe it or not, was not what had actually set her otX She ran to the john when Mike VanPile hacked off Orville's head and jarnrned it on a pike in the middle of Horton's lawn to chants of something they'd picked up in English class:

- Kill the beast, spi11 its blood!

A group of guys wearing Afterciiffe High's crimson and white footbaIIjackets had Iinked arrns and were dancing around the pike as if it were a maypole. They had smeared ketchup on their foreheads and were reeling and kicking their legs into the air.

Poor Helena. Poor Orville.

Fencepost produced some beer from a knapsack he had been carrying and opened them for us. We walked towards the fire pit and looked around. 1 estimated that there were at lest a hundred people on the narrow green peninsula of lawn behind the house, and probably fiAy more inside. A grave1 driveway extended fiom the road and ended in a srnaIl parking lot in front of the barn. Several pickup trucks of various sizes were nested on the driveway, each with its

box full of beer-swilling partiers in lawn chairs. A rented saund-system was blasting Def

Leppard fiom near the machine shed. Near the fire pit, WaIly Horton himself was dispensing

from a keg, working the crowd with winks, waves and headbanging motions.

- No serenade, no fire brigade, just a Py-ro-man-ey-UH! Wally sang, or screamed,

rather, his eyes cinching shut as he laboured to reach the high notes. A group of Muskies, al1

sporting what the Weed Man called the "Junior Eh" haircut (Canadian Forces on top, Geddy Lee

at the back) joined Wally for the song's chorus:

- Rock of ages. rock of ages, still (mum b le), still rock and rolling...

The Troops and 1 were just beginning to feel festive when, out of nowhere, something

crashed into me. 1 was knocked to the ground. My Bic lighter sailed, spinning end over end into

the fire pit. It went off with a bang that scattered the pagans on the football tearn.

As 1 caught my breath, the person who had clipped me scrambled to his feet and

continued running towards the pickup trucks. 1 soon saw why he was fleeing. Vaulting over

coolers and beer cases and bellowing Iike a bu11 was Marc RiopeIle, the Aftercliffe Muskies'

"enforcer" recently imported fiom the Gaspé. The kid wove in and out between the pig roasters

with Marc closing fast.

When he reached the gravel driveway, the kid, stilI running, turned his head to look

behind him. As he did, he Iost his footing in the loose Stones, performed a cartoonish little

lurching scramble across the grave1 and thudded, headfirst, into the door of a pickup truck.

The Troops and I arrived on the scene to see Marc hunched down in the crapping dog

position, laughing. Sitting cross-legged on the gravel with his steel-rimmed glasses akimbo was the dark-haired kid, rubbing the top of his head. LuckiIy for hirn, the truck was unscathed. The owner was one of the Muskies and, as the bumper sticker warned, pithily: "You Toucha My

Truck 1 Breaka You Face."

Marc was still laughing and calling his fnends to have a look.

- Ha, ifs lucky for you you've got such a lard 'ead! Boy, you looked stupid ruming ha'cross the driveway like that! Maybe now you'll think twice before you lit on the girlfiiend of someone bigger than you. Or do you want me to pound the Iesson into you some more?

The kid cleaned his glasses and looked up at Marc, who was still smirking at the gathering celebrants.

- Actually, Marc, 1 didn't know she was your girl. However, in fùture 1 promise IfIlask a series of screening questions before any romantic encounter. The kid stood up and began beating the dust out of his blue jeans. In the side entrance to the house, Marc's girlftiend leaned against a doorpost in his Muskies jacket, her arms crossed. She entered the house and was out of sight.

Riopelle, who seemed good natured enough when not wearing skates, helped to dust the kid off, albeit a Iittle roughly.

- Well now, that was some bit of community theatre, eh? 1 said to the person at my right, whom I expected would be Frank or the Weed Man.

- Sure was.

1 glanced sideways to see Randa Keller, her long brown hair pulled into a French braid, her black mascara matching her sealskin-tight designer jeans. She looked like a Stedman's version of a Cosmo girl from five years ago, though you had to admire the time it must have taken to get the style right. Al1 those years in fiont of the bathroom mirror, experimenting with shadow and concealer. Who could blarne her for not wanting to give up her look after she'd invested so much time in it? That it might be put on for my benefit tonight was a defin'!te turn- on. Fencepost and The Weed Man, both nearby whistled up at the setheatrically and casually moved away, confirming my suspicions that they'd spoken to her. 1 wondered what the terms of the agreement were, exactly. And whether I'd wom any aftershave, I'd been sweating a Me bit,

If my odour offended, she didn't Say anything. I didn't Say much at all. Away fiom the customary environment of the donut shop and the server/client relationship, the usual flirtatious patter didn't corne quite as easily to me. The best 1 could do was to offer her a beer, which she accepted.

The rest ofthe evening, 1 continued to ply Randa with alcohol. It was hard to Say which of us was the parasite, In retrospect, 1 think it's possible that she arrived at the party "dry" and sought me out, something probably prearranged by Fencepost and Weed. We began sitting closer to one another. Eventually, 1 put my amacross her shoulders. She moved a little closer.

1 wish 1 could remember what we taIked about, but I think 1 drank a lot that night. Besides which, the conversation we were having was a forrnality: a necessary preamble to making out.

After ail, as the Weed Man once coached me, you don't want to stick your tongue in the mouth of a cornpiete stranger. That would be crude.

As the Weed Man and Fencepost played court jesters for the football team, entertaining them with stones and with a few vials of hash oil, Randa and 1 slipped away fiom the firelight and headed toward Tailgate. The Troops saw and saluted us with beers upraised. 1 blushed.

We slipped into the back seat. 1 locked the doors, just in case Weed or Fencepost decided to surprise us. 1 clicked the key back to get the radio playing. Then, uncertainly at first,

I kissed Randa on her fiII, bee-stung lips. But she did not kiss back. Instead, she maneuvered herseIf on top of me and crushed her hip bone against mine- She bit my earlobe, then said,

- Relax, This is going to be good- Then she took off her top.

What happened next was rny first experience with sex. It was also my last,

I'm not sure what 1 expected it to be like, but 1 had a vague notion that sex would

somehow be like falling into an especially flueduvet, gentle and enveloping. Or else Iike sharing the skin of a snake, our bodies reticulating and bending in unexpectedly pleasant ways.

But instead, Randa inserted her surprisingly long tongue in my mouth, which was Iike being probed by a peeled banana, I thought. Then, just as I was getting used to that initial sensation, she took me by both ears and started steering my face over her body. FinaIIy, she grabbed my crotch and started yanking, violently, as if she was ripping out a deep-rooted weed, like a dandelion. 1 wasn't so much aroused as fiightened into action.

This was the first of the night's injuries.

When we were done, 1 managed to ask Randa if she was on the pill. Only aftenvards did I notice her arms, white and doughy. And razor stubble, brown in the armpits like dried nettles. In the moments before, she had seemed tantalizing. Now, it was vulgar the way she had taken advantage of me. My light blue jockey shorts were under the front seat. I retrieved them, my fieckled ass pointed upwards at the wide back window. Randa was sweaty, smoking a cigarette and reclining Robenesquely. She laughed at me as 1 scrambled to find my tube socks.

She said:

- What's the matter, Speedy?

1 didn't bother to answer her. Tailgate was stearny and smelled like fi-ied mushrooms on the inside. 1 pulled on my T-shirt. The car seemed suddenly old, like a war veteran teetenng out of the Legion Hall after last calI. 1 could hear the fkme rusting beneath us and the shocks giving way. Small cracks were fonning in the windows while the faux-leather began to flake

away from the seats like scales. 1could smell gas dripping as the tank corroded open, and Randa

was smoking. A11 I could think about was escape. 1 had the front seat tipped over and was

reaching for the door handle when 1 heard a key turn in the lock I barely had time to exclaim:

- What the hell?

The Reverend's hand reached in and snatched me right out the back seat by my left am.

My forehead thudded against the car's doorfiame. The Reverend's fmgers Ieft a purply

tattoo 1 could see for days aftenvards. I remember starlight above me as he slammed rny back

into the rear fender. Pinning me by the collar bone with a single, wolf-haired hand, he peered

into the back seat to see Randa Keller, shrieking and stuRing herself back into her clothes. If

1 was a little disoriented, 1 can't imagine what Randa thought, seeing The Reverend's white

beard and snowdrift eyebrows looming through the driver's side door like a Sunday-school

picture of God. He turned fiom her to me, put his other hand on my belt buckle and lifted me

off the ground. He pounded me into the side of the Caprice again. Part of the trim caught me

in the lower back. I found that bruise in Weed's bathroorn mirror the next day.

- Hi Reverend. Here for the pig roast?

I could see that The Reverend's eyes were boiling and flecked with red fiom the bonfire.

That his teeth, like his fingemails, were chiselling into skin. He brought his face close and

sniffed my breath. His smelled like coffee. 1 looked away.

-You disgust me. You sicken me. You should know better.

And he dropped me to the gravel, where 1 managed to stay standing.

The Reverend shoved his spare keys into his pocket and turned to walk down the road where his car was parked. He got a few steps before 1 muttered: - 1 dont give a shit what you think-

The word "shit" was made especially pIosive on the Reverend's behalf. 1heard an excited commotion coming fiom the house and realized that my fnends had seen the Reverend's arrivai.

With speed that was surprising for a man his size and age, the Reverend whirled around, took two steps toward me and was back in my face.

- It's not what 1 think lad, it's what God thinks. Do you suppose that you can drink yourself stupid and Lord hows what else, pounng poison into the body that you were given to care for, without penalty? Do you think that you can screw around like you just were with that little whore and not grïeve the God who made you?

I'd never heard the Reverend use the word "screw" or "whore." They seemed out of place. He thrust a long accusing finger at me Iike I'd only seen hirn do in church.

- Think what you want about your own family, but you're part of the family of God.

When you're in His house, you're responsible for obeying the rules. You break those rules without asking forgiveness and you've joined the other side. He was begiming to raise his voice.

Conscious of my role in the growing spectacle, framed by the dozens of people quietly standing or leaning against each other and whispenng on the lawn, 1 began to defend myself.

- Haven't you heard, Reverend? The master of the house is gone. God is dead.

I expected to be crushed into the fender. I'd been saving up this insult to his faith fiom my readings in my OAC history class. To my surprise, the Reverend only laughed.

- God is dead, said Nietzsche. Nietzsche is dead, said God. Sophistry. That's the problem with you, Jeffie. Disbelief is al1 you've got lefl because you've become your own god.

SatisQ your own desires. Don't put faith in anything beyond yourself. Do you want to spend your whole life trying to be satisfied Iike this? He pointed at the retreating Randa, now halfway to the house.

Suddenly, his voice Iowered into his pulpit baritone and he spread his hands wide to include the congregating crowd on the Horton's front lawn. A piece of classic Reverend

MacArthur theatre usually reserved for Easter services.

- A Saviour came for al1 of you, to wash you clean, to quench the fire of sin. You'll never do this on your own. Your Iives have no meaning apart from God.

The party foIk looked around, expecting a thunderclap. They relaxed a bit when it didn't come.

The Reverend Iooked away from them and back to me.

- What are you going to do, Jefie? Burn with a lifetime of hatred for me like you're aIready in hell?

- Purgatory's wam too, Reverend. Only slower, like baking.

- You take nothing seriously. Irony is a coward's way of life, and someday you'll see that. It hollows out the heart so that a person becornes frightened to move, in tirne.

And he backed away for a moment, as if giving me room to admit that he was right.

After a pause he said, with Finality:

- You can always come home.

And, for the second time, he began to leave.

I could have let it go at that. But 1 didn't.

- Home? Oh, I'd forgotten. You're an expert on the sanctity of the Christian home, aren't you, Reverend?

The Reverend came back at me, alarmed.

- Shut up, lad. You're drunk and you don't want to do this in front of these people. - Don't you te11 me what to do, old man. You'd like me to shut up, wouldn't you?

You'd like these people to think you're so much better than they are? Well, I think they might

like to know who you reaIIy are.

- i'm waming you.

- What are you going to do, Reverend? Cut me off! Tum me out? Throw me into hell

yourself? I've got news for you, you've already managed that,

I turned to the people on the lawn,

- Hey everyone, guess who the Reverend is! He's the boatman! He's the very Devi1 himself?

He clamped a hand over my rnouth. He pinched my nose between his finger and thumb.

1 has the sensation of being underwater, heart racing and the surface too far above. The

Reverend spoke slowly.

- Jefie, you're drunk. Shut up and come home. We91Italkabout al1 this later. What are you trying to do, destroy me? 1s that what you want? And he let me go, sweat forming on his cheeks and the fürrows of his face deeper than I'd ever seen them before. 1 was running my tongue over the iast scraps of his reputation and he knew it.

Wiping the taste of his fear out of rny mouth 1 gathered up my breath and said:

- To hell with you. To hell with your God. Fuck you both.

And that was when the Reverend hit me. 1 saw it coming, but couldn't move. The blow knocked me sprawling across the dirt road. I crumpled against the side of the car. When I took my hand away fiom my mouth, a chip of tooth was floating in a pond of blood in my cupped paIm. It wasn't until 1 tried to speak through broken Iips that 1 reaIized 1 was crying. He had never hit me before. - 1s that ... an example of your God of love? Of forgiveness?

The Reverend, hatf turned away and heading back down the road said, cryptically:

- That God's an invention, 1 170 AD. Look it up when you get to university.

By the time the Weed Man and Fencepost reached me 1 was standing up, watching the

Iittle rectangular headlights of the Reverend's Sunbird pull away. I was shaking.

1 saw Randa KeIIer once, in Country Tyme, before I Ieft for La Salle. She wiped down the coffee carafes while 1 pretended tu read the Toronto Sun. Most of the swelling had gone down on my face by that point, and 1 was living with the Weed Man in his new little one- bedroom apartment beside the Queen's Hotel. 1 could have invited her over, but 1 didn't. 1 didn't want to. Even if 1 had, 1 knew what the answer would be. 1doubted that I would ever see her again anyway. I thought it didn't matter.

l packed what 1 coutd into Tailgate and asked rny mom to have the rest of rny stuff delivered to the fiont door of Roscher Hall, the fiosh residence. The night of the pig roast severed me fiom my parents' house. And Aftercliffe, for that matter. I miss neither. The

Reverend is nearing seventy now and, though 1 wonder sometimes if he's retired, or how his health is, 1 don't want to know badly enough to find out. 1 don't even taIk to Ian and, until two months ago, 1 kept my phone number under Invisible Rurni's last name.

The first semester at La Salle, I researched 1 170 AD and think 1know whzr thp. Reverend meant. It's when the concept of Purgatory first entered Catholic theology, It was articulated by

Peter Lombard, the intellechial son of Peter Abelard. My knack for historicaI connections and coincidence had to corne fiom somewhere, I suppose.

1 haven't seen the Reverend in eight years.

Except, sometirnes, just before I fa11 asleep, 1 see his back as he walks away for the last

65 By the time 1 awoke fiom my Marxist-inspired nap, my bedside clock read 4:02.

Somehow, 1 had snoozed the afternoon away. 1 was probably late, ifthe VIA guy had been right about the six hour delay. If I missed the arriva1 and Mrs. Kendall somehow found out, it would confinn her worst suspicions of me. That could be dangerous. It wouldn't do at al1 to have been

late twice in the same day.

1 rushed to the train station and opened the fiont doors at a run. The taped announcement, now winding down, told me that Mitchell Quist's train had arrived and was already leaving for points West 1sprinted across the marble floor and back outside. There were a lot of passengers on the platforni, probably owing to the backlog in Québec. The yellow and blue VIA train slowly gathered speed and hunkered away. The passengers began to disperse and

I searched the stragglers for someone 1 thought would be Mitchell Quist; there were two older women surrounded by a sea of baggage and one confused looking, bandy young man with a black accordion briefcase that had papers squirting out the sides.

1 began to walk down the platform towards the man with the briefcase. The sun had reappeared, and the moming clouds had scudded away on the afternoon wind, bathing everything in the day's last Iight. 1 heard a voice behind me, coursing over itself with a deep, melodic eastern tilt.

- You would be JeEe MacArthur. Am 1 right?

1 turned and saw Mitchell Quist, walking across the platform behind me, fiamed against the sky. He was well over six feet tall, and the way his shoulders inflated his oilskin riding coat,

1 could tell he was coiled and powerfiil. His walk was heavy-- he staked out the ground or measured it with his exact paces. But it was also as though he was holding back something formidable, as though he was restraining a river or a high tide rushing in behind him. As he neared, I saw that his eyes, which never lefi mine, were liquid blue. He held two leather bags.

He set one down and extended his right hand, calloused and immense.

- Sorry it took me so long, buddy. I'm here to begin my work. A Touch of Fire Chapter Four

... and in lesthan an hour I was threarened ofmy life by two or three men. An officer ofernigrants came to me first with his reproaches in the public sseek saying, he wanted that 1 should convert him. i told him, 1 rnight have expected good manners and civility fiom a man that made his appearance.

Frorn the Journa1 of Henry Alline, July 2, 178 1 -

This morning 1 met with my supervisor, Dr, Morris Blijver.

The door outside Blijver's office is well known to me and 1 imagine that I'm also well

known by it. Dr, Blijver's door is like a living thing. It has features. The forehead is made up of two sepia articles on multiculturalism fiom the Trudeau Eia, running downwards into a pensive fiown, The mail dot is a mouth that feeds on overdue papers. Above the mouth is

Blijver's nameplate, which at some point was inexplicably moved down to chest height and now dangles from its one remaining screw. On either side of it are two small photos of Blijver: one has him fishing in a Stream, naked fiom the waist up, pale belly spilling out of his hip waders

Lke a pan of potatoes boiling over. The other shows him in a suit at a podium.

Blijver's door is a projection of his mood, or would be, if Blijver had moods. He is nearly always easy-going. Considerate. So, when for a few weeks in the spring, pichires of little children with large, sad eyes dorninated his door, no one was surprised. Near Christmas exams, stories of bizarre suicides and cult rituals obliterated the children. In January, antique Punch cartoons featuring Winston Churchill appeared along side a bizarre handwritten note which proclaimed: "Think how Iong 1 might have lived if 1 had quit smoking!" Finally, last summer, the door warned passers by of thinning ozone, religious eschatology and hair replacement programmes. People in the department became a little concerned. Blijver stayed his usual self. - So, MacArthur, how is your work coming?

Burlap. The chair covering, I thought to myself, is burlap. Dust plumes empted as 1

raked my nails across the fibre. Are history professors deprived of new furniture because the

university administration knows that no one will notice? It's a safe bet. The faculty don? seem

to realize or care that the white maple shelves, (dust powdered and tatty even in the poor light

filtering through the blinds), are disco-era, In fact, everything in Trent Hall feels and smelts of

1976. From the vinyl wallpaper to the piss-rusted electric radiators in the men's room. Perhaps

the present is blinding and busy to professors. Maybe they mean for the angel of fashion to pass

over Trent Hall, and spare them the murder of the tast decade in which they were tmly Young.

Maybe that's a bit of an overstatement because it doesn't apply to the one or two younger faculty or some of the few women who have been hired, but it does apply to Morris.

Blïjver belongs to the decade before Trent Hall was built. His mernories of beads and peace symbols are a faithful workhorse, trotted out each semester in his Twentieth Century

American History course and beaten to death in fiont of an audience of eye-rolling undergrads.

Legend has it he used to lecture dressed in pinstriped overalls and yellow rubber clogs, as though he were taking a break f'rom gardening. His offrce shows a similarly performative caretessness.

Books, extniding sideways from the shelves in am's reach of his desk, are apparent proof of a busy and fertile mind. If you visit as often as 1 do, though, you begin to realize that the books have been open or mis-stuffed for a semester or more. 1 find that comforting. Others might see it as lazy. Blijver isn't lazy, just easy to please, if you know how.

- Well, Moms, it's tough. The secondary source material is in, but I'm still negotiating with people in Nova Scotia to get a peek at AHine's journals. 1 mean, Atline wasn't crazy about

Calvinists, even lapsed ones. Its as if I'm being thwarted by his ghost or something. 1 paused.

- I'm still trying to recover fiom the fire, too.

I looked at Blijver to make sure he believed me. It was hard to tell. Behind his thick glasses his eyes appeared unnaturally small. He forked his fingers through his mop-grey beard, leaving a rnantle of dandruff on his sweater. He coughed.

- I sympathize with your situation. You've gone through an ordeal and everyone knows it. Nevertheless, MacArthur, you must realize that there comes a time when one must gird up one's loins and get on with it, so to speak. More to the point, you're draining my capacity for resourcefulness. I need another chapter fiorn you soon, or I won? be able to justify your teaching assistantship to the department next term. Go to Wolfiille if you must, but dont expect much money for the trip. Sorry.

As he spoke, I tried to imagine the way he must have been in the 60's' svelte and tie- dyed; maybe even wearing the same sweater. But it is beyond my power to see hirn as anything but an overweight old man, his skin falling away one precious ce11 at a time. It's like that for me with the already old. Perhaps when he's dead, 1'11 be free to imagine him Young.

It's difficult to maintain my distance from Morris. From his fatherly affection for me,

1 mean. But it's a complex relationship. I have no need of his in loco pmentis concem, but 1 do need money and the department's patience. And he's the head of the History Department, making funding for my work both easier and a bit more political. It's a bit like a hockey draft, as Morris might Say. Every prof has one or two students who are "protected" and given good salaries to keep them on the profs team. However, there has to be a modicum of faimess and, while the department head usually has a little more buying power, he or she can't simply give egregious amounts of time and money to some students since it ups the ante for the rest, especially if there's no visible product. So we do this playedowner negotiation often, Blijver and 1; he leads with a grudging question about my academic progress, 1 shoot back with a fabricated reply followed by a brief chat about the NHL (Moms and I are both hockey fans, though he roots for the Habs and I cheer for the Buds). Then, 1 leave and duck him for as many weeks as possible.

To my advantage, II know that Blijver considers me a diamond in the rough. I am as unfocussed as he had been dunng the 60's' and I exploit this weakness. He Ends my predicament diverting enough to maintain me as a student, provided that I fil1 him with lots of stories about my generation's angst. He realizes how difficult the job market is for academics and how spiritually bankrupt consumer society seems to people my age. For some years he's been working on a manuscript about religion and Baby Boomers and often uses me as a sounding board for his ideas. So I'm usefiil to him. Furthermore, dislodging me fiom the teat of departmental finding would require papenvork, and paperwork is a pox to Morris.

After the initial round of questions, the meeting passed quickly. We discussed some new texts on religious revivalism, Blijver said he was praying for acountry without that "big-chinned, bastard son of Arnerican corporate interests" in Ottawa and asked me what 1 thought about

Toronto's slim chances of making the playoffs this season. 1 offered that Cliff Fletcher couldn't possibly be expected to erase two decades of Harold Ballard's buffoonery ovemight. The Leafs were rebuilding, 1 said.

He Iaughed at that. One of his silent ones. He has a habit of slowly throwing his head back and opening his mouth, but no sound comes out. I don? know if it's politeness or if it's real. He's never laughed any other way that I know of.

There's another thing I don't know about Morris. His books are al1 dedicated to one person, Someone called Ani. But Blijver has no children and has never married.

Like so many people, he is solid enough when you view him at a distance, but the closer

you get to hirn the more hazy his edges becorne, ***

I awoke early the morning after rny sorties to the train station. The evening had been a

warm one at first, so 1 had left the window open. During the night, though, a hint of fall's cold,

les% air had crept in along the carpet.

In the dream 1 had been having, the Weed Man and 1 were kids. We leapt and dove into

piIes of fiost-gilded leaves so that Our clothes were stained with fa11 juices in al1 the exuberant kid-places. Elbows. Knees. Back pockets.

Above us, in the canopy of naked branches, hovered Claudia. She watched as we tumbled and rolled. As we cavorted Iike a couple of pups, we Iooked at her to see if she approved. Not once did she smile.

I opened one eye, as ifto see her better and saw that the alarm dock read just past seven.

1 had passed fiom sleeping into waking as though I hadn't been drearning at aIl. * * *

Where 1 had kicked a fürrow in my floor-clutter, Mitchell Quist's sleeping bag lay rolled atop his pillow, his coat spread out like a mattress. The door was partly open, as though someone had taken care in closing it. Mitchell Quist was not downstairs. 1 half-expected him to be sitting on the cinder block supported couch in fiont ofthe TV. The decor at my place was an aesthetic 1 called Noserhaus;a collection of hanging macrame baskets, two Archie Bunker recliners and assorted garage-sale items that were never intended for anyone's use but my own.

My kitchen table was wiped clean and the previous Saturday's Globe and Maii was folded neatly on top of it. The fiidge radio had been permanently tuned to CBC Stereo which, at that

moment, was pIaying one of my mother's favourites: Gluck's "Dance of the Blessed Spirits,"

from the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. It was a typical moming, except for the unprecedented

facts: it was eariy and someone else had shared the house with me overnight.

Only when 1 started to trickle the tap for coffee did 1 glance out the window and notice

where Mitchell Quist had gone.

My bacbard was not large. As far as houses go, my three bedroom place was

undersized and unexceptional, nestled between other '60's vintage starter-houses on the east side

of the river, or about fifteen minutes at a brisk walk fiom the university. My room was shag-

carpeted and salmon coloured, with one window that faced out to where Rideau Street started

to curve into Farley Avenue. Invisible Rumi's bedroom was larger than mine, covered in a pelt

of dust and just as irresponsibly decorated. The third room was full of boxes stored there by Our

divorced landlady, iudy. Certainly she hadn't invested much in the house. But the backyard had

a ridge, a scar on the landscape that was only beautifil if you could make yoursetf forget the

misery that had put it there in the first place. It's the border of a nineteenth century quany mined

by chain gangs fiom La Salle Penitentiary, though not many know this.

The ridge is three metres high and divided my house from the Iot behind. That particular

section was only a fiaction of a pit hidden by backyards and trees for four square blocks.

Sometimes I imagine the men with their picks and shovels in the hot Sun, sweat-drenched and

muttering. Like angry artists sculpting a meteonte crater into the ground. Out of respect for them 1 didn't try to make the ndge pretty, but let it go, allowing weeds to break out of chinks and

crevices.

As the Sun rose, slipping the cover of the roofs shadow fiom the yard, the rock became illuminated. At its base, warming in the still-cool Sun, was my houseguest. 1 immediately realized that he was shirtless. Even at this distance, the right angles of his shoulders seemed accessories to the Stone wall behind him. He sat in the lotus position, a squared jaw thmst up toward the Iight. 1 couldn't tell if his eyes were opened or closed.

1 had forgotten about the running water.

Minutes later, clutching my coffee, 1 padded barefoot and hesitant down the concrete steps and into the dandelion dotted grass. I trieci to approach Mitchell Quist quietly, not wanting to sneak up on him, but not wanting to surprise him either.

He spoke first, startling me.

- Helluva morning eh, JeEe? His face was still turned upwards. There was no warm place to put my feet. Mitchell Quist was barefoot, too, and with al1 the dew on the grass I supposed that his butt would be soaked through by now.

-Yeah, 1 replied, taking a sip of steam. 1 avoided looking at him the way some people avoid looking at breastfeeding mothers.

- So, is this some kind of New Age crystal power meditation you're doing?

Mitchell Quist opened his eyes and lowered his gaze to meet mine.

- New Age? He hummed the words, thinking.

- Quite the opposite, actually. I was just sitting here thinking about the Old Age. This age, if you will.

He resumed his pose.

I shuffled into the light and sat down on a chunk of limestone. The way he addressed me was irksome. Not since my AftercIiffe days has anyone called me "Jefie." It seerned, too, as though he was making himself feel at home at my place. Did he think he was going to live with me? The campus housing service opens at eight. 1 thought about taking hirn there. He

continued:

- It's a11 about cellular phones. Right now, a few people have thern in their cars. Next

year, as the pnce drops, twice as many people will have them. The year after that, celluIar

phones will be even more affordable. That's what happened to the caiculator, Right now a

persona1 cornputer is a perk. Next year you'll need one. Now 1 ask you: why?

- What do you mean, 'why'? Why do people buy technology?

- Exactly.

I thought about it, crunching and uncrunching some grass with my toes.

- The media. Advertising. That sort of thing.

- Try again. That's too easy. People ofien criticize advertising as though it's beamed

here by aliens. It's made by people, let's not forget.

1 didn't want to get into a chicken and egg argument with him, and I played along.

- It's the convenience, 1 guess. People like to communicate more efficiently.

- Yes, JeEe, but will they have anything to Say? Right now people are still valued for

what they know. Tomorrow, for how fast they can acquire information. Knowledge gets obliterated by information and speed. You won? need to know anything except how to send and

receive information fast. So, as our words fly away fiom us at ever increasing speeds, they leave

our bodies behind. The words take on Iives of their own. But al1 the messages are essentially

the same message repeated, like a dinnertirne prayer: speed is great, speed is good.

- I've always said that speed's a killer.

- Worse. It's an eraser. Today is the OId Age, Jeffie- maybe the last day of the age that

Gutenberg built. The last day when you can still track the average person's words back to the source. Tomorrow, that's the New Age. That's when people's lives will be spent leaving messages and then trying to catch them, to disavow thern, or explain them. Tomorrow will be one long chase afier the wind. So remember this moment. Right here. When the New Age cornes and people live and move in it, swapping their faxes and e-mail messages, youlI1 be the only other person besides me who remembers what this morning was al1 about.

There was a moment to reflect on this. A scent of pollen was in the air, goldenrod, perhaps. I thought 1 could see specks of it drifting by, the aroma taking me back to Afiercliffe early Septembers- harvest time and men working the fields with tractors and sun bright backs.

- You're a bit odd, aren't you? 1 said-

- More than a bit, I'd Say.

- And this doesn't bother you?

- Jeffie, there are people in their twenties who are already saving for retirement.

Planning a fowyear stint of unhappiness so they can enjoy ten dormant years before they die.

If that's acting normal on life's big stage, 1'11 happily play the fool.

Mitchell Quist contemplated the Sun and clouds again, and as I watched the dew retreating fiom the corners of my brown shingled roof, I thought, passingly, about the other roorn; the one with al1 the boxes in it.

When the La Salle fiaminer was snooping around, they asked a lot of questions about

Mitchell Quist. 1didn't answer thern. What 1 thought about Mitchell Quist wasn't developed yet.

Isn't. The only person 1 can talk to is Dr. Royden Van Loewen.

Van Loewen sees Mitchell Quist as more than just acuriosity; which is still the generally held opinion of him here in La Salle. To Van Loewen, Mitchell Quist is an enigma, or at lest that is the word he chooses to use. That is close enough to what 1 feel about him, so Van

Loewen and 1 have a bond based on the shared unknown, the reverse of the usual graduate student/professor relationship.

Writing al1 this down helps me to figure him out. But it's also a paradox. The kind of irony that Diana would appreciate, that she could theonze about en par with Mitchell Quist.

Both of them would notice that, as 1 commit the words to paper, 1 have no control over their trajectory. The words will go to places I've never been. Meet people I've never met. Take on shapes and shades 1 never intended. And Mitchell Quist's definition will get farther and farther away fiom me and diffùse as I try to approach it, just as it did when he was close at hand. The signifier flies away fiom the signified. Jouissance dissolves meaning. The semiotic disrupts the syrnbolic. And power structures kick sand in the face of the tmth.

Yet Van Loewen and 1 keep talking. And I keep writing. Both are acts of faith, when you think about them. Beautifid, if fbtile. Or maybe beautifùlly futile.

At tirnes like this 1 feel 1 understand Mitchell Quist. And then someone in the Sole laughs loudly, and the pinball machine jangles or a spoon drops. And he's gone again. ***

- What's the rush? We dont have to go to the housing service first off. I think you ought to get an idea of what La Salle is like. You should see the city. Explore a bit. Take some time to weigh your options, 1 said to him, and handed him a cup of tea.

We had come inside after Mitchell Quist had finished his Sun ritual. From somewhere he'd produced a white T-shirt and was sitting on rny counter top. He said he didn't dhkcoffee, and finding a tea bag among the boxes of Kraft Dinner, sticky jam jars and open-ended Hostess

Sour crearn and onion chip bags had been noisy and messy, Mitchell Quist was eager to walk around town. 1 wanted to take my car. He won.

As we walked, I pointed out as much of the local history as 1 could. Our path took us west fiom my neighbourhood to the river. I pointed out the ochre turrets of La Salle

Penitentiary, and explained to my guest that both it and the La Salle Psychiatric Hospital fürther upriver used to be on the outskirts of the old town. Just past the prison, we crossed the wrought iron footbridge over to the right bank of the river. He was interested in getting to the university as quickiy as possible, so we ignored the stores and restaurants of Queen Street and cut through

Ashbumham Park, past the verdigris-domed county courthouse and south towards the lake.

La Salle's campus has matured over the course of a century. What began as a homely one-building school near the shore swelled to a beast covering six blocks. It had taken me almost my entire freshman year to leam al1 the names of the various halls and buildings, so uniforrn in size and texture, but Mitchell Quist seemed to know them already. He correctly identified the Grad Club, the Biology building and even the relatively new Geology and

Geography centres by name. Cf he was impressed by the natty Iandscaping and cropped lawns, he didn't say so.

We made the rounds at Trent Hall. 1 introduced Mitchell Quist to Mrs. Kendall, who took him to meet Van Loewen and Blijver. Since [ wasn't keen for a chance encounter with

Morris, 1 sat in the office 1shared with two other grad students and resurrected my notes on the

Methodist circuit riders. It was at this time that 1 read an irate letter by a Methodist pastor,

Ramsey Burwash, who had just passed through Chignecto, Nova Scotia, in July of 178 1:

We have been visited here of late by the Falmouth preacher Henry Alline, who has much stirred the populace with a gospel of mixed materials derived from opposite sources. [t will be some months before we can resume building faith on a firm foundation in these parts. 1 was intrigued. A curious comment for one saddlebag preacher to make about another.

1 later found out what Burwash meant. One of Alline's more contentious ideas was that Adam

had both male and female characteristics. Iconoclasts and mystics. And Nova Scotians. The day

was tuming interesting, in spite of my usual suspicion of novelty. I made a note of Burwash's

comments and decided to do some additional research on Alline.

Several hours later, Mitchell Quist reappeared and our campus tour resumed. As we

walked towards University Avenue, 1 asked him about his first impressions of his professors.

- Ifmnot good with first impressions.

- No, seriously, what did you think of Van Loewen? - Personally, or scholarly? - Both. Either.

By now we were beside the Fine Arts centre, Donald Hall, and were watking toward the

Plaxton Hall clock tower. Half a century before, La SalIe's most often-photopphed building

had been the campus chapel. Since none of the nearby buildings were allowed to surpass it's

height, much of the nearby campus is entrenched three or four stories into bedrock. The clock

had been stuck at three o'clock for the pst six years, a fact that most outsiders miss unless they've seen a lot of photographs and held them side by side. It surprises me how many people

have actually done this.

- Plaxton Hall? asked Mitchell Quist, looking up.

I replied that it was.

- Used to be a church, right? Now they use it for convocations and concerts?

I told him he was correct.

- You get the impression it's a pretty important building, though. They even fly the University flag on the spire. When you mention La Salie Universisr out east, Plaxton Hall is what people see in their minds. But whatever it used to represent left this country-club school a half-century ago, no matter how much people try to pretend otherwise. It may look some important, but it's empty.

We walked fiirther.

- So, what did you think of Van Loewen?

- I just told you, Jefie. ***

One time a few months later, playing pool at the Grad Club, 1challenged Mitchell Quist about the way he talked. I'd had a few beers. I sometimes get careIess when 1 drink. It's like touching the wrong cable to a battery terminal and getting hit by a shower of sparking words.

- You never just come out and Say anything, do you? You're always talking with a slant, like one of those novels where the characters infer everything and it's al1 very elliptical. Like

Yoda. It's starting to drive me nuts.

- Who's Yoda?

Mitchell Quist had huge gaps in his knowledge of pop culture, so references to things like Star Wars were pretty much meaningless to him, something that I found hard to beIieve, though by contemporary North American standards f'm not much of a media hound either.

Frustrating, too, because it took me a while to come up with a classical example before 1 decided that Yoda was a bit like the Delphic Oracle, at the same time deciding that I needed to review

BuIlfinch 's Mythology if we were to have a meaningfùl conversation. 1 did a break shot, and the balls cracked and scattered into constellations. None went in. Mitchell Quist chalked up his cue, shot and missed, too. - If you knew everything that 1 do, what I say would sound incredibly direct, he said.

- And just how am 1 supposed to know everything that you do?

- Same way most people leam anything.

1 took my shot, aiming at the four bal1 balanced on the cuR of the side pocket. Thè pocket gulped it down, followed by the cue bal1 for dessert.

- Retrospect? 1 asked.

- You're getting the hang of it, JeEe. ***

Late August was the wrong time to look for housing in La Salie. Most of the houses in the student ghetto ringing the campus were still being sublet for the summer. The Ghetto is an undergrad haven anyway. Mostly, it consists of abused century-old brick houses. Generations of university students have left their mark on this part of the city, which has seen its share of litter, copulation, street parties and the ground-in Sour smell of bazooka-barfing in the bushes.

As an undergrad, 1 lived there, and 1 suggested to Mitchell Quist that, if he was S~~OUSabout studying, the Ghetto might be a touch too robust an environment.

Nevertheless, we toured a few sad-sack houses along Lewis and Dennis streets. Mitchell

Quist listened to the slum lords with a half-smile on his face. At one place, Our guide explained a brown-stained convex ceiling as "distressed," a sales pitch that would have made Fast Eddie proud. Fist-sized holes in the drywall were next on his list of priorities, right afier he found out where the previous tenants had stashed the toilet.

As the landlord pulled away in his Jetta, Mitchell Quist tumed to me.

- You know, this would be a good time to ask me to live at your place.

I was just about ta He had fùll fünding, after all. Writing in the Sole Café night after night is therapeutic, as well as stimulating, When

1 sit here, 1 think of philosophes Iike Voltaire debating lofty ideas in Parisian salons or bohemians like Man Ray and Jacqueline Goddard whooping it up on the Left Bank- Al1 the enlightened folks come here. lt's not that the university is oppressive, exactly, but free thought is a little more fluid where alcohol is plentifil.

Besides me, there are a few regular writers in the café, One guy is always here. He shambles in at 7:30 precisely. He orders one ta11 black coffee, drops a black sketch book on his tabIe in the shadowed back corner, folds himself into a chair, Iights a cigarette and writes. Every now and again, our gazes meet when he walks in. I note that his eyes are brown, with dark circles underneath. He wears a wedding band. When he looks up fiom his work, though, his fingers are twisted through his hair and he becomes a comered animal. Sarne person, two faces.

One prepared for people, and the other for confronting whatever he puts in that sketch book.

1dont know what he's writing. I've never asked. I might never have noticed him except that he seems to have a routine Iike mine. And because he sits in what used to be Diana's table.

It bothers me that people Iike him can simply pour themselves into the holes left by others and not even know it.

Diana herself might Say, as she often did, that the natural world works that way. You need to accept change as it cornes because ifs not al1 bad. That was her roundabout way of giving advice, 1 think, her way of getting me to Iaok at Iife differently. She thought that you should expect to receive strange gifts, so that when they come you'll be prepared. That way she and Mitchell Quist were nothing alike. He would Say that change is a gift we give ourselves.

For two people who had read a lot of the same books, they certainly disagreed ofien, though Mitchell Quist was definitely pushier since Diana's appreciation of theory stressed its useful aspects whereas he was living al1 of it. ***

It was getting Iate. 1 suggested to Mitchell Quist that we head over to the Sole Café for dinner and a pint or two.

- What about a place on Queen Street, instead?

- The Sole's on the way home. We've done enough walking for one day,

I couldn't remember the last time I'd had as much exercise. I felt a Iittle light headed.

- Corne on, JeEe buddy. First impressions count, don't you think? He winked. When

1tried resisting this guy I felt Iike the Maidof the Mist, churning powerfully to a standstill in the

Whirlpool Rapids.

Ten minutes later, we were crossing Queen Street outside the Brass Taps. It's the only bar in the downtown core without windows. Tt is the oldest public house in La Salle and had entertained such notables as logging baron J.R. Booth, engineer Thomas Keefer and a young

William Lyon MacKenzie King. But it does not look like it would invite them (or anybody else respectable) now. Maybe it's gotten Sour over the years. Wom out fiom seeing too many people dmnk and fighting. I recall walking by one evening and seeing blood on the concrete outside and a fat, mustachioed guy with an unbuttoned shirt and a gold chain mopping it up.

- Let's stop here. You said you wanted a beer and some food, didn't you?

- Nonnally, I might agree with you. But you don? understand. No one ftom La SaIIe

University ever goes into the Brass Taps. It's a townie bar. Strictly off-limits for students.

- Do they have beer and pbhere or don? they?

- I suppose so. - Weil, then, Polyphemus, shut your one good eye and roar around the cavern afier me.

He didn't wait around for me to argue and he didn't explain what he meant by comparing me to the cyclops. Before I could stop him, he was inside. 1 had wanted to tell him the local

legends. That if you ordered a milk and Pepsi it was a code- it meant that the bartender would take you upstairs to a whore. Or the one about the biker who beat up La Salle students the minute they entered the place. Relations between the university and the town of La Salle are sornetimes quite strained, in spite of the money that well-heeled students bring downtown with them. Like the whole town has made a stygian bargain.

One time, during the annual Seagram's Rowing Regatta, 1 was accosted by a dmnk in the lineup at the beer store. He couldn't have been much more than thirty years old. Bunch of rich bastards and bitches, he called us. Think we're so smart. Well he had a degree from

Champlain College and a job, and that was more than we'd ever have. 1 didn't Say anything, which made him even madder. In the end his buddy had to haut him outside the slidinç doors, where they continued to argue until their haïr began to fa11 out and the tobacco stains crept up their teeth. When 1 left, the two geezers waved at me and commented on how hot it was for this time in September.

1 considered waiting until the locals fiushed Mitchell Quist out. But he seemed to have sensed that The Brass Taps was dangerous and had plunged in anyway. After a few moments of hesitation and fietting on the sidewalk, 1 finally pulled open the door.

My eyes adjusted slowly. Except for Mitchell Quist sitting at the bar, I could have swom

1 was back in AfterclifEe. The place was dank. Smelling of buried smoke and swarnpy carpets.

A lopsided pool table. A scmm of old men in baseball caps playing euchre nearby. From some unidentifiable source, 1 could hear country music beginning, the familiar yelp of Dwight Yoakam going on about "guitars, Cadillacs, hillbilly music." I found Mitchel1 Quist easily enough, sitting beside two jars of pickled eggs at the bar, bilious yellow submerged in green.

Past the eggs, a beer pitcher full of fiesh cut wildflowers, a card paper-clipped to a broken stem.

There was threat here, a Sour smell fiom the bathrooms and a lurking sweat in the panelling, 1 know these scents well. They mark temtory. lf you are not one of the people who helped put them there, you're in for trouble because you're soon sniffed out.

- You're an idiot, 1 hissed, over his shoulder.

He said nothing.

- 1 suggest we get the hell out of here. They're known to beat up people like us.

I have been hit once in my life. It's an experîence I'm not keen to repeat.

A bottle of Molson Export and a bottle of Labbatt's 50 amved. The bartender was a gaunt woman who gave us a crooked smile as she twisted the caps and threw them in the trash in a single, blind motion. Mitchell Quist didn't turn around, but cleared his throat and took a swig.

- Look around you, Jeffle. Any of these people look evil to you?

- Evil's not the issue. These people belong here. We don't. Put down your crappy beer, step away fiorn the bar and follow me.

Mitchell Quist was chuckling.

- S it down. We're blending in. Drink your crappy beer and tnist me, it's okay.

I didn't trust him, but t sat down anyway. As I did, 1 heard the door to the bathroom slap open behind me. A voice, roar like an unmuffled engine, ripped a hole through the back of my skull.

- Hey now, who the hell are you? And 1 hoped the man's body didn't match the man's voice which, naturally, it did, Six feet and several hundred pounds of black beard and Ieather was busy buckling its belt, from which a silver chain dangled and looped into a back pocket.

There was bicep the size of a stove pipe flexing and unflexing itself near my head, a tattooed snake's head on it that was baring its fangs. I tentatively swilled my beer around. The bar got quiet. I half-expected to hear a player piano and a squeaky saloon door.

Mitchell Quist rose to his feet and pumping the biker's hand.

- Pleased as anything to rnake your acquaintance, mister. We just settled in, but we'd love to sit around and yap with you. Can 1buy you a beer, buddy?

The biker looked at his hand, sized up Mitchell Quist and looked back at his hand again.

- So, what'll you have? Mitchell Quist asked.

1 counted out a beat. It seemed like a long one.

- 1'11 have what your ftiend here is having, the biker grudged. And the iittle nervy knots in my neck unwound a bit.

And that's how 1came to sit at the Brass Taps, elbows propped on the bar protecting my beer from witd gestures, a reientless easterner to the left and a rnountain of motorcycle gear to my right. The legendary Brass Taps bouncer, 1 had no doubt. The guy who mashed faces with his fists and broke ribs with his boot, as the stories went. Before too long, we were into Our third beer together.

I've met many academicl; who consider themseIves friends of the common man.

Political Scientists who write gracetùl and sympathetic treatises on Mayan natives in Guatemala.

Psychologists who dip into populations of injured workers or drug addicts and then arrange them tidily into study groups. They'll plunge fearlessly into the high Arctic in a bush plane or sifi through the Sahara with a colander, but their choice of subjects is almost always extreme. They choose to study the interesting, fnnge, novel or outcast. They don? usually study the comrnon people of their own culture or time, not because the hoipolloi are uninteresting. That's just an excuse professors use-

Diana's theory was as follows: there are two reasons why middle or Iower class

Canadians are mostly spared academic scrutiny, unless it is as an aggregate. The first is that academics generally come fiom Iower or middle class backgrounds themselves and really don't see much point in exploring what they aIready bow. Frankly, 1 told her, that's my excuse for not studying the history ofNiagara dairy fming. But the second is that, over the course of their careers, academics tum into professors whether they intend to or not. The word "professor" being, of course, a catch-al1 for anyone too big for his or her britches.

If home for you was Kamloops or Victoriaville or even Scxborough, folks there begin to take your interest in Ieaming as an affkont. As if learning was something you did just to eclipse them. Sornething you might have said before you lefi for school, an innocent remark over dinner, say, becomes an attempt to psychologize, frame them, trip them up somehow. You have no choice but to think of yourself as an outsider, and you naturally find friends amongthose whose experiences are similar. Before long you go from buying Kraft Singles in the supermarket to Kryddost fiom the deli and from drinking screech on the back stoop to sipping shiraz between bites of a nice filet smothered in beamaise. Not because they are intrinsically better, (though perhaps you will come to believe they are), but because your new position requires refinement and distinction where the palate is concemed. Paradoxically, retinement is generally not expected in one's wardrobe. (Morris once told me that he dresses as he does because well groomed historians lack credibility. His dad had been a foreman in a lumber mil1 in BC.)

Diana concluded that, while professors might think back wistfilly to the working-class

neighbourhoods of Hamilton (or, like Moms, put a matte and fiame around a lumber grading

certificate), those places and times are sealed like a tomb. Academics turn their backs to home

and vice versa, even if they don't want tu. Though of course for some, like me, it was the plan

al1 aiong.

In other words, for an "intellectual" to pass as a 'clocal" is nearly impossible. Even for junior academics like myself, only a few years out of the loop. Unless you're an Irving Layton

or some other poet-cum-brawler, the ability to appreciate the cornmonplace without irony is lost.

There's a way of sitting, either in judgement or in fear, that broadcasts the fact that you're

watchfùl or apprehensive.

1 was sitting that way. Mitchell Quist was not. * * *

- So, Mitchell Quist fiorn Nova Scotia. Where abouts are you fkom out there? What's

your bag? The biker burped up bellyfùl of sulphur between WovaY7and "Scotia".

- I'm fiom a small town. You wouldn't know it.

- Try me.

- You know where Glace Bay is? Mitchell Quist asked.

- Nope.

- Louisbourg?

The biker belched again. Onions and lemice decomposing in a wet ashtray.

- Never heard of it.

- Cape Breton? - Sounds familiar. 1s that where you're fiom?

- Yep, Mitchell Quist said. My folks have a small farm, but we mostly set out lobster

pots. I was in carpentry up until last week. Frarning, mostly. That's du11 as yesterday's toast,

though. You should hear what my buddy Jeffie does!

I shot hirn my most maievolent look, or tried to-- but he was so relentlessly gregarious

by this point, it was Iike winging him with velcro tipped darts or pelting him with M&Ms. 1

could feel the biker's attention turning my direction.

- I'm in apples.

- Apples? 1 didn't know there were apple farrns around here. No money in it. The

Frontenac Axis makes the soi1 shallow and the growing season's too short. Lake effect isn't as

strong. Not like down Niagara way. Only an idiot would have a hitfann up here. You're not an idiot, are you?

Mitchell Quist jumped in, thinking quickly.

- The computers, he means. He sells computers, right, Jefie?

1 nodded. My cheeks were buming and 1 swat lowed some beer, noisily, to cool them.

- Yessir. Jefie here may be dumb as a bag of hammers, but he flogs those Apples like there's no tomorrow.

- Not much money in them, either, mark my words. Hate the damn fiddly Little buggers.

Me, 1 like a good PC. A man's computer. Like the difference between a Harley and Jap scrap.

In the four or five hours we spent at the Brass Taps, 1 learned most of the important differences between domestic and imported motorcycles. I Iearned how to distinguish between the rival gangs the Red Devils and the Outlaws, I understood that Harley-Davidson bikes were

God's persona1 gift to the open road and that anything less was a "rice burner." In one of the few topics unrelated to two-wheel vehicles, 1 also leamed that our new drinking buddy worked for Revenue Canada. Foolishly, 1tried to make light of the man's occupation (it was getting late) and he asked me if 1 was being smart. 1 replied that, no sir, 1 was not being smart-- 1 wouldn't even think of being smart. He thumped a heavy-rnetal hand on my shoulder and told me that was a good thing, since he didn't Iike people who tried to be smart. That was when 1 thought of an excuse to leave.

- We'd love to stay and chat some more. Really. I nodded in Mitchell Quist's direction.

He started to stand up.

- My %end here is tired fiom his trip, a long train ride. And well, you have that interview with Van Loewen tomorrow. I stood up and prepared to leave, closing my pack of smokes.

The biker's outraged howl was an am's length hmmy ear.

- You're Lasalle Students? My sweat glands burst. Blood mshed to the tips of my ears.

I backed awkwardly into Mitchell Quist. My cigarettes fell out of my hand. Behind me, 1 heard his even-keeled voice.

- Jeffie didn't say that. He said 1 have an interview with a lawyer tomorrow.

The biker slarnrned his beer bottle into the bar. Foam gushed out the top. He began

Ioosening his gold-plated wristwatch.

- 1heard him Say you have an interview with Dr. Van Leowen tomorrow, he growled.

He handed his watch to the bartender. Automatically, she stowed it under the bar. Most of the patrons turned towards us. The mood was turning festive.

- Dr. Van Loewen's a dentist, said Mitchell Quist, calmly.

- He's not, but you're gonna need one. Don't bullshit me. His voice was an octave lower. He cracked his pinky knuckle.

- I guess maybe 1 didn't introduce myself. The name's Morgan Van Loewen, and I'm afiaid you boys are going to have to step outside.

1 had known Mitchell Quist for just over twenty-four hours. A Touch Of Fire Chapter Five

God wi1I indulge his children with his hand To lead them safe thro' al1 this desert land, And will cal1 them from this mortal shore To realms of light, where death is known no more.

Poem fiom the Journal of Henry Alline,

- When we get to the door, run, 1 said to Mitchell Quist,

- What?

- It's Our only chance. We can lose this guy.

- No.

1 couldn't believe that he wouldn't run. Unlike the Reverend, 1 have never been a fighter.

When he was my age, the Reverend had been a corporal in the British arrny. Then he met a young music teacher, Catharine Jeffery, (whose maiden name eventually became my first because her only brother, Gus, remained a bachelor for reasons shadowy and undisclosed). Then the Reverend atîended seminary and immigrated to Canada, landing his very first preaching job in Aftercliffe. But even as a minister he was a soldier. A scrapper. Fond of rnilitary allusions in his sermons. Martial hymns that my mother's classically trained ear despised, but that she played anyway in her emerging role as organist and de-facto second-in-command of the kirk.

The Reverend was in his glory. En everything fiom the presbytery to local politics and the AAC, the green and gold threads of the MacArthur tartan were closer to his skin than his vestrnents.

The Afiercliffe Action Cornmittee was struck in 1969, the year 1 was bom. The committee was the result of a political Damascus experience, the Reverend claimed.

Somewhere between the Paris Revolution and Woodstock, the Reverend reached a socialist

epiphany. He never divulged what had caused it. The onset of a mid-life crisis, perhaps, or my

birth, (which itself was arguably a byproduct ofthe mid-life crisis). But whatever had triggered

it, the Reverend's social gospel conversion lasted Ionger than the ideals of the Summer of Love.

He mobilized a goup of similarly inspired presbyters and wannabe hippies into a community

watchdog organization. Using petitions, pickets and letters to the editor, the AAC led the fight

against the use of DDT in the Niagara region and supported employees of the local Dominion

store during a strike in 1971. Al1 through the seventies, the Action Cornmittee sprang to the defence of workers and attacked the misuse of power. The committee was not widely popular.

Aftercliffe had voted Tory since the days of James P. Whitney, and most people were leery of

Liberals (let alone socialists) in their midst- But the Reverend was undaunted. He endured a congregational mini-revolt that led to defections to the Anglicans and Baptists (though a few

Presbyterians, Mr. Morrison the restauranteur for one, made a point of staying at St. James out of spite). Our house and the church both were vandalized (eggs against the windows mostly and the occasionaf rock). But, eventually, even the AAC's enemies got tired of its perseverence and the guerilla attacks petered out. Although the AAC's numbers dwindled in the early 1980'~~the

Reverend and a handfil of mernbers continued to write and intempt the flow of "progress" and

"commerce" in the area. They irritated conservative councillors and businessmen, people like

Mayor Hagan who, because he was both a politician and a business owner, hated the Reverend doubly. For years the AAC had helped block a proposed zoning change which would have allowed Hagan to build his own feed mil1 on Regional Road #4, right near the downtown on a vacant lot. As 1 said, the Reverend was a fighter.

One night, 1 let it slip at the dinner table that the kids at rny public school were buliying me. (One of them was the Weed Man- a gangly grade six student who had been kicked out of the Catholic school). In the warm months, the bullies pelted me with grave1 collected fiom beneath the swing set. When it turned cold, they shoved mitts full of salty road-snow in my face-

- the dreaded "facewashl'- that stung your eyes and made your nose m. 1 still detest the smell of wet woollen rnittens.

The bullying began after my big, popular brother Ian graduated to senior public. It was always the kids in Weed's class who targeted me. E figured it was partly because of the AAC, of course, and also because the older kids were starting to get sinfiil urges. 1 was cast as the herd's conscience. Plus, 1 was eccentric, though I never thought that a fondness for Chopin and

Dickens justified facewashes. Afiercliffe kids were just quick to despise anything that seemed precocious or citified.

It came out this way: we were just starting supper. The Reverend asked me how my day at school had been. 1 started sniffling. lan just sniggered, making it worse:

- Poor widdle wussy. Ian kiss your boo-boo for you?

- Get stuffed, [an, I said, and started crying at my potatoes.

The Reverend told Ian to hold his tongue, and he tned ta console me with a mini-homily entitled: "Sufferïng for the Lord's Sake." When my mother put down the gravy boat to get a towel, though, he moved his chair next to mine.

- Do you want me to teach you to fight? he whispered, eyes twinkling.

1 sniffed, and the snot bubble under my nose impIoded.

- Why? - Why? So you can defend yourself, lad. Sometimes a man, even a Christian man, has

to fight. If you let people beat you now, they're going to beat you for your whole Iife. You don?

want that, do you?

- But if I fight back, they're just gonna gang up on me.

- The trick to fighting a gang is to single out the ringleader. If you knock him down, the

rest will think twice about coming after you.

1 considered it-

- 1think I'd rather hurt them with words. The fiesh tears had stopped, but the stale ones

still clung to my face.

It was the Reverend's turn to consider. He was either surprised by my apparent wisdom

or by my wimpiness, but only momentarily. The clerical robe won out over the tartan. He said:

- You're right. But dont cuss. Just heap some burning coals on their heads. He put his

arms around me and pulled me close to his broad chest. 1 hid my face in his shirt. Then, rny

mom returned to wipe away the rest of my tears and mucus.

My father passed me the family bible; a red-letter King James. Leather-bound with a zipper to keep it shut. 1 read from it and as 1sealed it, 1 felt as though my insides were being knit

back together, too. It was either my faith in God or my beIief in the Reverend that did it. ***

What 1didn't tell the Reverend (and what Ian knew, though he didn't Say it at the dinner table) was that the ringleader was a girl. Marcie Hagan. Muscular as an Italian bricklayer tiom

handling feed bags at her dad's farrn. Her dad was Mayor Hagan.

1 couldn't hit a girl- or at least not Marcie. She'd whip me, for one. Secretly, 1thought she was preq, that she looked tike Wonder Wornan,(a TV show our mom had banned but that Ian and 1 watched in secret). Marcie was also the daughter ofthe enemy. News of a tight would

get back to the Mayor and I'd get bIamed and it would look bad. 1 didn't want to hurt our

family's reputation in the community any more than it had been by the AAC. It didn't matter

if 1 won or lost the fight, it was the MacArthur name that was bound to be smeared.

The opportunity came one day when i heard some of the grade sixers teasing Ray Dunlop

after his mom inflicted one her more shocking haircuts on him.

- Leave him alone, 1 said.

The kids stopped. They thronged around me. Philistines surrounding David.

- He can't help it his mom can't cut hair, 1 said, sounding braver than I felt-

They al1 laughed. None of them, 1 discovered, really liked their parents. Not even

Marcie, who ruffled my hair and put me in a playfiil headlock, jamming my face into the side

of one of her prodigious, beanbag breasts. From that moment on, 1 was the senior class' pet.

That incident taught me a few lessons. The first was to make the bully laugh, if you can.

The second was that pecking orders were everywhere, and that Ray Dunlop was at the lower end

of one of them just as 1 was. The Weed Man remembered me when 1 reached high school and took me under his wing. Lastly, 1 Iearned about the power of subtle betrayal. Sooner or later,

most people turn on their parents, and doing so makes them tougher.

But i never learned to fight. ***

1thought for a second about Mitchell Quist's seerning willingness to scrap with Morgan.

- What do you mean, no? You heard him. Does "step outside" mean "do your dancing elsewhere" in Cape Breton?

Morgan was two steps behind us. The door to the Brass Taps was several tables ahead. Around us, the bar had erupted into spontaneous cheerç of "Morgan, Morgan," which he acknowledged with a gladiatorid wave-

- It's okay. Trust me. Simmer down, JeEe, Mitchell Quist said.

- What, do you know some kind of lobster death-&p or something? Now would be a good time to tell me.

One of the three-handed euchre players whacked me in the knee with his cane as we passed. His teeth were like October corn, brown and broken. He exhaled jagged, archaic words at me. He told Morgan to make a batch of burgoo out of my goddamned hide. The man sitting next to him, (who could have been the other's twin) said:

- Welcome to the schooI of [ife. Perfesser Morgan will now give you your first lesson.

People sitting nearby started cackling uproariously.

In the middle of the commotion I whispered to Mitchell Quist:

- When we get clear, it'll be two to one. If you can take him, 1'11 heIp.

By then, we were on the Street. We descended the cracked concrete step to the sidewalk.

Morgan faced us and 1 was thinking: this is a good time to make a break for it But, unaccountably, 1 didn't. I might have been thinking that Mitchell Quist had something up his sleeve. Certainly 1 wasn't staying put because of any loyalty to my housemate. We'd just met.

Mitchell Quist stood between Morgan and me. A poster on one of the Taps' boarded-up windows, a notice left over from tast winter's Gulf War protests caught Mitchell Quist's attention and he seemed to be reading it, nonchalantly.

- So, which one of us did you plan to beat first? he said to Morgan, and stifled a yawn.

- 1 figured I'd do Red, there. Why, you want to go?

- 1 suppose thatts best. Jefie here wouldn't even make you break a sweat unless you were chasing him. He was suggesting a second ago that we mn for it.

- No kiddin'? Smart boy- Morgan nodded at me approvingly. He was stretching his forearms and clenching his tists. Heaven forbid he should pull a muscle, I thought. Why do guys aIways preen before a fight, anyway? There had to be a paper in that ritual somewhere.

Maybe in a psychology journal. Anthropology, more likely. History, possibly, though 1couldn't imagine where one might Iook for sources. 1 was conscious that it was Morris in my head, speaking.

It's surprising what you think of under stress. 1 also found myself fancying that this would be a good time for my myth to make an appearance. If I could have wiIIed Morgan into a wheelchair, or lit him up like one of Emperor Nero's human torches, I would have. But of course, my touch of fire doesn't work that way. It doesn't corne on command like a dog.

- So, is Dr. Van Loewen your father? Mitchell Quist asked the biker.

- He's not my uncle.

- It's a hannless question-

- It's not. You're stalling. Don't you think 1 know that?

- Fair enough, Just answer that one question and I promise I won? ask any more.

- Yeah, the Good Doctor's my father. Look, the nice folks in there are expecting me to paint the sidewalk with you two. They count on me to provide a service; it's my job to keep at least one corner of this city free of university brats. So you're going to have to shut up now while

I lay the beats on you.

- But we're graduate students, I protested, hoping the words would have some weight,

- So, you're gradua1 students. Just means you infest the town longer than the rest of lem.

Which of you is first again? - Not gradual students. Graduate students. We live in La Salle year-round, 1 offered,

as if correcting an undergrad.

Morgan loosened his belt, and his gut swung a Little more fieely:

- 1 said gradual students. 1 rneant gradual students. Jeez. 1 suppose you've never read

John Irving? The World According to Garp?

1 hadn't, 1 said. After my time, 1 said, since 1 tend to read nineteenth century fiction if

any at all. But ITdtake his recommendation seriously.

- My recommendation? This isn't a book club, Red, it's a beating. With langage like

that, how can you possibly think that you Zive here?

- 1 do live here. 1 have as much part of this town as anyone, 1 said, meekly.

Morgan scoffed.

- Do you think you have anything in common with the people who were born in the La

Salle hospital, who went to kindergarten here? This is their town and you university brats are just an overhanging fog. But you think it's the other way around, don't you? Well, in a couple

of years you'll melt away and we'll al1 still be here, cleaning up a new generation of barf and

piss and empties.

1 stared at the ground. 1 was conscious of Morgan bristling, smacking his fist into an

open palm as he paced the sidewalk in front of me, but didn't dare look him in the eye.

- And you think you' re so goddamned smart. Do you have any idea what my salary is?

What the average income is in La Salle? It's a damn sight more than your OSAP Ioans get you,

I can tell you that much. The bars and stores, the banks, the market-- everyone feeds on your

borrowed cash, on your irresponsibili~with money. So people here don't hate you 'cause you're smart, Red, though you'd like to think so. They pity you because you're idiots. Idiots and snobs- You make me puke,

Morgan was worked up. The longer he blked, the louder and closer he got. By the end

of his speech he was looming over top of me like a wrecking ball. Somewhere, a Iight tumed

green and the trafic on Queen Street began to pick up. Simultaneously, Mitchell Quist had a

brainwave:

- Speaking of snobs, I met your father this morning. He really is a bit of a pompous ass,

isn't he?

Morgan turned to Mitchell Quist, and I finally exhaled.

- He'll tell you he's earned the right, the pretentious bastard-

Mitchell Quist sucked air between his teeth and pushed his hair over his crown and out

of the way.

- So he's a bad choice for a supervisor, then?

- No, no-- he's an awesorne thesis supervisor. If you do good work for that guy, he'll see

to it that you attend conferences, get journal articles published, al1 that shiff. HelI, he's on the

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. You'd have to pound a lot of nails to make

the kind of funding he can sniff out for you. What was it he used to say? That he could find

gant money in the desert?

It was remarkable. As Morgan conversed, 1 could acîually see him relaxing. First his

chest deflated a bit. Then, the angle of his shoulders dropped. Before long he'd stuck out an

amto lean against the wall just avez my shoulder. Beer and smoke and a hint of Drakkar Noir wafied over me. His other hand went into his jean pocket. A tight fit.

- So Van Loewen's resourcefùl, then. I suppose that's good for me, Mitchell Quist said.

- Yeah, resourcefiil with other people's money. - I didn't corne here for the money, Morgan. 1 had a job, once. 1 know what it means to earn your way.

- That's what really burns my ass about the Good Doctor. He thinks he's entitled to taxpayers' dollars to fûnd his pissant studies- Do you know that the guy spent three years worth of gant money writing about this one Loya!ist, Captain William Crawford? The prick who cheated the Mississauga Indians out of the Bay of Quinte? I mean, who gives a flying fuck unless you're a Mississauga Endian, am 1 right? A book like that doesn't do anything but make about fi@ eggheads in al1 of North America happy. No one's gonna make a movie out of it or anything. So if you ask me, it's not worth paying my taxes for and it sure as hell isn't worth three years of your life wasted in some archive in Belleville.

- Crappy father, then?

- Shitty. Summa cum Zaude fkom the Yale of shitty parenting. It's a wonder that 1turned out as well as I did.

The street smelIs re-asserted themselves, A clutch of trafic surged forward, red and white Iight in the clarnmy night, Morgan seemed distracted by the movement, and watched as the cars went by. Mitchell Quist used the interva1 to seize Morgan's fiee hand and shake it solidly.

- Morgan, it's been a pleasure meeting you. Really. I mean it. I wish the circumstances were different, of course. But you've got a job to do and the people in there are probably wondering why it's taking you so long to dust us. So, swing away, buddy.

There was a pause. Inside that moment, the details of the streetscape lit up. Pink gum patches on the sidewalk, a plastic homecoming banner spa~ingthe street, rusted staples on a telephone pole, the hiss of bus brakes. Zeno's paradox playing itself out on the street as traffic slowed to a crawl.

And then Morgan let out a full-throttIe, tumbling roar of a laugh. It was a hard but pleasant laugh, and it made the corner of his eyes crinkle. He smoothed out his beard and ttiumped Mitchell Quist on the back hard enough that he actually lurched forward a foot.

- You know, for an academic and a leech on the ass-end of the system, you're nota bad shit.

Turning to me, Morgan said:

- And you should fearn to load your brain before you shoot off your mouth. You'd do well to follow this guy's example.

Mitchell Quist was pleased with himself, and grinned at me.

- Jesus, Quist, I Iike you. 1 don? exactly know why you're not Iike the rest of the fieaks up at the university, but you're okay. Take off, you guys. Don't corne back. And tell the Good

Doctor that you met me. The look on his face should be a treat. And with that, Morgan re- entered the Brass Taps.

The bar's patrons greeted him with a champion's welcome. We stayed outside until the noise died down and was covered again by music. By what sounded Iike the aria Nessun Dorma fiom Puccini's Turandut,but could not possibly be. ***

1 brought the Baptist Heritage version of The Journal of Henry Alline with me into the

Sole today. Obviously, it's a poor substitute for the real thing. You don't get a sense ofAlline9s mind at work in it. Nothing is crossed out. Without seeing the actual handwriting, you get a sense that he wrote every word confidently. In truth, the journal was wrïtten in a kind of spidery shorthand, and the Baptist Heritage version is a copy of the so-called Chipman transcription of the late 1700'~~for years the best document available to scholars. Alline's original had been lost

since about 1910. Last year it turned up at an antique dealer's shop in Truro, and Allinites got tremendously excited. It's now the property of the Acadia archives, which is where I need to

go if 1 want to do real groundbreaking research. Luckily, Morris says he has an "in" at Acadia with the head archivist, so I can probably move near the head of the queue ahead of other eager scholars, despite my status as a mere master's student. But, if 1 stay at La Salle, 1'11 be Iimited to already-published information.

Nevertheless, the Chipman account of Aiiine's experiences near Chignecto Bay (the preaching trip that got Ramsey Burwash into such a lather) is interesting:

...In a few moments there were near twenty men round the door, many ofthem swearing that they would be the death of me. 1 was advised by some in the house to go out at the back door (- privately) and get away. 1 replied that 1 would do it by no means. 1 was called there by God, and ihere 1 would stay, tiI1 duty called me away ... rny fi-iends advised me not to go out, telling me they would certainly kill me. 1told them 1 feared not, and they might fasten themselves in. 1 then opened the door and went out. They came around me, and one of them, lifting up his hand, swore he would be revenged on me. 1 caught him by the forepart of the coat with meekness, and begged him to consider what he was about, and to act like a rational man. He cursed and swore for a while, but did not strike me.... they then told me my life would be taken away in a few days if I continued preaching. 1 then told him (--them) I would preach until 1was called; neither was 1 about to Ieave the place, until duty called me from it: and after some more conversation with hirn and others of the Company (-hours with them), 1 bid hirn (-- them) a good night, and went in the house.

Abewas nota large man. Average height, curly blond hair and a medium to thin build according to the recollections of an old New Light woman some decades later. But apparently he had an ex-rogue's charm, (like BiIly Sunday only less manic), that contributed to his success as a preacher. 1 can imagine him in July of 178 1, surrounded by twenty men as night began to fall, surprising thern with courage that stemmed frorn pity rather than physical strength. Of course it was a self-consciously apostolic gesture. But the kind of reckless faith it took to face that arrned mob is impressive.

My heroes have always been people who could emerge unscathed frorn even the worst situation, people who played by their own niles. Who had the courage that 1 lacked. Until the night outside the Brass Taps, 1 never stopped to think about how they might feel about me. ***

- Morgan's luclo/. 1 mean, 1 was just getting ready to help you pound him.

Adrenaline was still zipping through my veins Iike quicksilver. Hyped as I was, I almost believed my own bravado. As we walked north on Queen Street, I capered and bounced on the cracked sidewalk- 1 whooped a war cry. 1 bowed to passers by. My hair flamed in the lights of the store-signs and with the nsing heat in my arteries. Al1 the while, Mitchell Quist regarded me quietly.

- Weil, JeEe buddy, 1 hope you're not a revisionist historian when you do your academic work, too. It seems to me you're misrepresenting the past.

- Are you kidding? 1 was just waiting for you to make a move- 1 was right behind you, man.

He put a hand across my shoulder and drew me in roughly, still walking.

- You're never going to be a good historian if you're a lousy student of human nature.

Morgan was never dangerous. Even if he was, you're not.

- What are you saying?

Mitchell Quist stopped and turned to me.

- You're a chicken, Jeffie. Plain and simple.

- And you're not? 1 didn't see you nsing to meet the challenge.

- Count your teeth. They7real1 present, are they not? - But you didn't do anything. You just talked to him. He still could've smeared the sidewalk with us,

- No, he couidn't, Jefie. When Morgan let me talk, the power dynamic shifted and 1 took control of the situation. Discourse, buddy, is a most devastating weapon.

- Bull. He could have just decided to punch your lights out.

-No, he couldn't have. By permitiing me to take charge of the discussion, he ceded any power he had for violence. 1 interrupted his narrative and inserted a counternarrative, moving us fiom silenced objects into speaking and acting subjects. In a sense, 1 created people for

Morgan where before we'd simply been tropes: La Salle students. You wanted to run, which would have confirmed his opinion of La Salle students as a bunch of yellowbellies. At best you would have insulted the man and had your face punched in for your troubles. He didn't much appreciate your sarcastic sense of humour.

- Listen, 1 wouId have never gone into the Brass Taps by myself. None of this would have happened if you hadn't been here.

- Jeffie, if you don? go out and chaiienge the world, it'll write itself al1 over you,

Morgan or someone like him wouId have found you sooner or later. You don't think 1 did anything? Foucault disagrees. 'Discourse is a violence we do to things,' he wrote. Morgan will have to think of La Salle students differently now. And if you te11 this story, word will get around that two students survived the Brass Taps. Legends get made that way.

- Me, a legend? 1 know that's not true.

- Not yet, maybe. That depends on your will.

- Yeah, well I want to remember tonight my own way- The way 1 recall it, 1 was ready for a fight. - You can't, Jefie. By entering into this discussion with me, you've allowed me to challenge and upset your construction of events so that you can't reconstruct them without interference from me. I've rewritten you. How's that for the power of discourse?

- 1 wish you'd shut up so 1 can think for myself, 1 replied.

Mitchell Quist's deconstructions were draining the adrenaline out of my system.

Replacing it was the hunger I'd been feeling before we'd gone into the Brass Taps. 1 had a craving for poutine; a French-Canadian concoction of gravy, fiies and cheese curd that had recently slithered into eastern Ontario. West of Trenton, one does not easily find it on the menu.

We ducked into one of the many pizza- and-poutine joints on Queen Street- Mitchell

Quist took a nibble of the coagulating stuff and pronounced it inedible. He said that he didn't usually eat food made in a deep fiyer. I finished his portion for him. ***

As I recall the night's activities, I'm struck by two incongruities that 1 might have noticed earlier had 1 not been dumbstruck by excitement. The first is that poutine should surely have found its way East into Nova Scotian roadhouses at about the sarne tirne as it reached

Ontario travelling West. 1 remember that my high school urban geography text showing that cultural innovation ofien travels in concentric circles fiom its point of origin. And who ever heard of a construction worker who didn't eat fried food? Then again, who ever heard of a

Revenue Canada accountant wearing leather and riding a Hog?

The second incongruity is that Morgan had ushered us outside. He could have beaten us in the anonymity of the Bras Taps rather than on Queen Street. Mitchell Quist had been right: Morgan never intended to do us any harm. 1 didn't find out why, though, until rnonths later. In hindsight, as Mitchell Quist might Say. Later, the night beginning to chill, we walked north towards the footbridge. Most ofthe town's revellers were indoors, having migrated to the various bars for last call. Both of us were quiet, and the poutine was sitting in my stomach like a blob of clay. 1 made Mitchell Quist walk at my pace. About a block before the footbridge, we passed Crazy Bob, leaning on a garbage can near Manna's Milk Store.

With a psychiatric hospital, a university, a military base and three penitentiaries in a town of medium size, La Salle is a rookery for kooks and crackpots. One gets used to seeing them after a while, because they seldom hassle anyone. Sometimes, though, they'll do something that makes it impossible to ignore them. Like the time the sweaty old woman in the

Rastafarian hat confronted me on Queen's Street saying:

- Dnigs. 1 know you're on drugs. They have everyone on drugs now. Even poor old

Admiral Nelson, God bless him. It's al1 the fault of that Michael DeRuyter and that Dutch East

India Company.

Or the professor, emeritus of the physics departrnent, who painted her house as many as ten times a year. Since her place was on my route to campus, I'd observe as lavender washed over the trim and window fiames one week, then mint green over the walls the next. Then tangerine wouId creep across the trim just before the house turned white. And so on. A pinwheel in slow motion al1 through the warm months. She even coated the plastic flamingo each time to match the gable trim until, swollen by untold layers of paint, it finatly bent its slender metal leg and came to rest on the lawn.

Crazy Bob, though, was different fiom al1 the other loonies. He was a part of the town's furniture, like a TV tray or an ottoman, and was recognized by La Salle students. Not everybody called him "Crazy Bob," of course. His name varied according to one's program. The

Engineering students called him "Parkaman," the Commerce students "The Dumpster King" and the Classicists 'Rester John." The name "Crazy Bob," though, was probably his most universal alias. No one knew the real name of the man whose posts altemated between the garbage can outside Manna's and the park bench at the public Iibrary. I'd never seen hirn en route, so his movements were a mystery to me. He never spoke to anyone, focussing on the ground whenever people approached.

This particular evening, Crazy Bob was dressed as he was year-round: a bright red, fur- lined parka, unzipped galoshes, white hair and beard greased and matted and a rolled up cigarette loose between two tea-skimed fingers. The sight of him should have moved me to pity, but the truth is that 1 found him comical. An absurd, schizophrenic Santa. And since he was always silent, 1 saw no reason to revise my opinion. So when he spoke to us as we passed, the shock of it made me jump almost past the curb and into trafic, then speed up suddenly to get away.

- A bitter place! Death could scarce be bitterer. But if 1 would show the good of it, 1 must talk about things other than the good.

Mitchell Quist stopped walking. I went past him, hoping he'd eventually turn and catch up. He didn't, and 1walked back and tugged on the back of his shirt. He didn't budge, and was listening to the old derelict intently. The sounds Crazy Bob made were like air escaping a punctured tire and were barely audible hmwhere 1 stood.

- Prepare ye the way for the floodwaters. No place of grace for those who avoid the face. No time to rejoice for those who throw their voice. Time, but no time again. He wobbled the garbage can back and forth, waggling its plastic tongue with the force of his agitation. La Salle's unwritten protocols are simple, if you know them. Students stay out of the

Brass Taps. Townies stay out of the student ghetto. Never cal1 anyone a "goof," because it's

prison slang for a child molester and you never know who might be around. Never ask an ex- con what he did time for. And, obviously, never talk to the crazy people, even when they speak to you. And in a second, Mitchell Quist stepped though the portal of another convention, propelled by whatever knotted inner Iogic possessed hirn.

- Evening, buddy. Sure but it's cold out, eh?

Crazy Bob shook his leonine head. Looking down, crestfallen, he coughed:

- Night of the hungry ghosts. They're always so cold. Cold. But a man must have fear of just those things that truly have the power to do us harm, of nothing else, for nothing else is fearsome.

Mitchell Quist stayed anchored to a spot on the opposite side of Crazy Bob's trash can.

The breeze was blowing off the lake. Downwind, Bob smelled like a backed up public toilet.

- Hungry ghosts? Who are the hungry ghosts? Mitchell Quist asked as he bent over to catch Crazy Bob's averted gaze. Bob still refùsed to look at him.

- You-- you know thern. Today's their day. it's today. A11 day. They're cold. What are you doing back here, anyway? Though 1 suppose that al1 those who perish in the math of God assemble here fiom al1 parts of the earth; they want to cross the river, they are eager. Sorry 1 yelled at you, just now. Crazy Bob seemed genuinely stricken and was sure he'd given my friend cause for offense.

- It's okay, buddy. You have a good night. You stay warm, now, Mitchell Quist consoled. - Good to see you again. You are wise, you see more than my words express.

The rest Bob muttered incoherently into the thatch of his beard and parka. Mitchell

Quist gave him a reassuring pat and finally tumed to leave. As he did, something new crossed his face. 1thought at first it was concern for Crazy Bob, but it was more like worry. Mitchell

Quist searched my face for something that wasn7tthere, and then he was back to his old self,

- 1 like this tom, Jefie my son. I think you're pretty fortunate to live here. Folk here seem real, you know? They have a certain kind of warmth, if you know where to look for it.

I'd never thought of La Salle people as warm, though admittedly 1 didn7tknow many of them. It seemed to me before that night that everyone in town simply went about their business.

Shopkeepers tended their shops, criminals (and criminally bored students) broke and entered, undergrads went around buying and drinking and rutting; studying only when they reaIIy had to.

The word "La Salle" can, of course, refer to either the town or the University. It depends on how one deploys the word. The name itself is contested; townies refer to the "university" and students to the "town," and both use the word "La Salle" to describe their own space.

Diana thought that university towns often define themselves in relation to the campus in various rings of desire and loathing. The university's rests in its ability to exclude people fiom campus life, even as the citizens of the campus battle each other for interna1 control. Outsiders admire the university as a symbol of knowIedge, but resent the monopoly on knowledge that is projected- In my limited experiences with people in La Salle, one first determines their relation to the university if it is not made obvious by their age, clothing or speech. Negotiations are cornplex. People in the community insist on their independence fiom the institution, even as they long for its lustre to rub off on them. lnsiders like Van Loewen cultivate an ivy-league aesthetic despite the humbling truth that La Salle University is, in Diana's pithy summary, just "EPCOT Orcford,"

1was trying to think of a way to encapsulate some of this for Mitchell Quist. It wouldn't do to have him ruming around, introducing himself to everybody. 1 hoped that he'd learned as much fiom Morgan as 1 had. If he hadn't, then sooner or later Mitchell Quist was bound to run into the wrong person, an ex-con perhaps ora pison guard, and he was going to get into the kind of trouble that doesn't stop to talk.

Mitchell Quist drawled, scratching his armpits:

- Man, 1 am sweating buckets. Let's take a nice refieshing dip in the river. What do you

Say, Jefie?

1 pulled a liquefied stick of gum out of my pocket and flung the wrapper away. The night's consumption had lefi the taste of wet dog in my mouth.

- 1 Say there's nothing refieshing about it. That thing's &II of industrial sludge and shit.

I wouldn't dare swim in there. Even the carp don't care for the water. You could practically walk on top of it, or bum it, if you wanted.

This was almost accurate, though a little overstated. Factories dump byproducts into the river indiscreetly, thumbing their smokestacks at unenforceable environmental laws.

Furtherrnore, it's been dammed and diverted almost back to its headwaters in the Algonquins.

Along its course through town, the river either runs wild from sluice gates or else strolls, brackish and sludgy.

Mitchell Quist shed his shirt and thnist it in my hands.

- Last one in's a dirty rotten historical revisionist! He called, and ran off, vast muscles rippling purposefülly, towards the dark ribbon of water. *** The Reverend was always trying to improve the quality of my life. Building my character. He thought it necessary to enrol me in swimming classes at the local pool when 1 tumed ten. Both my mother and 1 protested, but the Reverend was concerned that I was becoming pasty from skulking around the house when 1should be in the sun. For my part, 1 was perfectly content to spend July and August filling up on Hostess potato chips and Milky Ways, reading Hard Times and listening to CBC Stereo.

During the inevitable family conference, the Reverend told me a cautionary tale about a wee lad he knew in Scotland who had drowned in Loch Awe trying to retrieve a soccer ball.

I pointed out that if the fool had been reading instead of playing outdoors, he wouldn't have drowned. A reasonable argument, and it actually made the Reverend laugh. But it was still decided that I would attend swim classes twice a week, on the two mornings when my rnother did volunteer work at the Extendicare music library and could drive me.

Tuesdays and Thursdays 1was handled like baggage at an airport terminal. RattIed awake by the Reverend at 7 AM, 1 was delivered to the breakfast trough, still half-conscious, handed a big green towel and checkered swimsuit (both with my monogram fastidiously stitched in red yarn) and trundled out the door. lan, who biked to his summer job doing piecework at a cucumber farm, left under his own power. Two summers went by like this.

At the Lion's Club Aquatic Centre, I'd fish out my red pool pass that bore my narne in sprawling blue cursive. Small for my age, 1 stood on tiptoes so that the attendant could see the talisman, She'd take the pass in exchange for a locker key, and I'd slump off to the change room. Once there, I'd wiggle into my checkered polyester swimsuit behind my locker door, keeping as much of my freckle-spangled skin (especially my shy Little penis and raisinette testicles) out of public view. Then, I'd pick my way through the showers, across the treacherously slick cerarnic tiles, past the row of men lathering their swaying, hairy organs in the steam and heat, and towards the sharp scent of chlorine. For a full hour, a broad-shouldered hi& school jockette would try, 1 felt, to drown me. In the two years 1 took lessons, 1 never overcame my fear of treading water and twice had to be pulled out of the pool to lie, coughing, on the hard tiles. 1 hated to have my failure made so public and sometimes wished I couId drown poetically. Water was simply not my element.

One moming, the bench near my locker was occupied when I arrived. On it sat an elderly gentleman, his white hair wet and parted to the side. He was clad only in his towei, his wrinkled breasts lopping about as he pulled on his dress socks. He smiled at me and winked.

1 ignored him, opened rny locker door and stipped down to my powder-blue jockey shorts behind it.

When I stole a tentative peek through the venetian slits in the locker door, 1 could see that the man's hands were moving erratically under the towel. His face was turned towards me.

His mouth hung agape and his eyes were half-closed, concentrating. I fioze. Then, he realized that 1 was peering back at him.

He slowly removed his hands to where 1 could see them, and held them out, beckoning.

I yanked my dothes back on as fast as I could while the man made shushing sounds. I lefi my big green towel and swirnsuit behind. Without looking back, 1 ran to the counter, grabbed my pool pass and sprinted al! the way home.

When I reached our front door, 1 was breathtess and £?antic, It was locked. I fled to the side door and let myself in. The house was silent. My mother and brother were at work, but 1 expected to find the Reverend home. 1 called out for him. No answer. 1 called out a little

!ouder, more urgently. Still no answer. 1 ascended the stairs to the closed door of his study, slipped half-way, and crawled the rest of the staircase on my knees. I heard strange music coming from upstairs, something by Bob Dylan. The reality of what had nearly happened at the pool sinking in by now, felt tears coming on. 1 quietly dicked the study door ajar.

The Reverend had Company.

* * r(i

I like playing in the candIe on my table here at the Sole Café. 1 push my fingers into the fleshy softness near the burning wick. My fingerprint dissolves as the liquid wax washes back over its impression. It's something 1do to procrastinate. 1do this when 1need to consider what to write next, or when what I'm writing about is dificult. It's as if I've not actually Iived any of these moments fully until now. As if recording them makes thern real, finally.

Nearby, the other writer sits at Diana's table. It's taken some time, but I've finally gotten to him. He strains to see his own words. The meat is sucked out of his fingers so that his wedding band dangles between his knuckles like a key on a kite string. 1want to look away, to let him go in peace, but 1can't. 1 force myself to write because he doesn't matter, because in a minute he'll be gone.

*à*

Just below the steel Iattice footbridge off Queen Street, the La Salle River becomes ensnared in a bend. At night, it seems as black and still as wet pavement. There are no houses or other buildings nearby, but a dense stand of weedy trees clings to the riverbanks. The area floods occasionally, a reminder that the water still has the strength to rise up against its would-be rnasters, if it wants.

Mitchell Quist had Ied the way through the leafy curtain some minutes before. Guessing his path as best I could, 1 began scrabbling sideways down the long ernbankment. Once within the grove, the plant Iife and the nearby water sealed off the sounds of cars and voices. My own blundering animal noises seemed amplified. There were ioud snaps of invisible twigs underfoot, and bushes swiped at my pant legs. 1 caught a whiff of the river- Iike musk, almost, and alive. Just ahead, the branches were drawn aside. Through them, 1 saw a single fleck of light. As 1 got closer, 1 saw another. Then a third light behind it.

1 reached the river.

Stretched over the flat, dark surface was a miracle- a constellation oftiny haloes. 1 saw an armada of paper boats, each glowing in the fragile light of its own candle. Bobbing gently, they seemed suspended between the coal slcy and polished onyx. Like cups above saucers of

Iight, floating like ghosts. As if calling back to the candles, fireflies blinked from the bushes, near the rocks where Mitchell Quist had thrown the rest of his clothes.

He stood in the middle of the Lights, naked and waist deep. On the footbridge behind and above him, two figures stood by, motionIess and backlit by the moon's gotden skin. 1 did not know who they could be. They were speechless, as 1 was.

When he saw me, Mitchell Quist slowly shut his eyes and slipped soundlessly under the surface of the river. Undemeath a host of fires. ***

A strange thing is happening. The writer at Diana's table gets up and leaves. Stiffly, but he makes it to the door. I watch him through the window, waiking towards the river. Each step stronger until he passes down the embankment and out of sight. A Touch of Fire Chapter Six

f went to meeting every Sabbath and some would tell me about the stars, and the great things that God had made, and others about the necessity of extemals, and being moral, &c. But 1 do not rernernber that 1 ever heard any one ofthem adapt their discourse to the capacity of chiIdren...

From the Journal of Henry AIline.

- Do you ever, like, lie in bed at night and pull the sheets over your head and pretend

you're dead?

Frosh Week.

The Sole Café was thick with new students and returning undergrads, their particles of

chatter bonding with the bar's smoke and strains of a Bob Marley reggae beat to form a polymer

of sound. In the Ghetto, domQueen Street, inside the pubs, the university season had begun.

Lozenge shaped vans shat the bric-a-brac of returning students ont0 downtown curbs; the

distressed desks, the centre-stained mattresses, the new computers still in boxes, the rnany

requisite "Stop" and "Yield" signs. Unloading was usually managed with the help of parents and was accomplished quickly so that student Iife could pick up where it had left off in Aprïl.

Goodbyes were limited to hugs on the porch and a single toot of a horn.

On campus, the mood was a little different. A sandy-haired entrepreneur was doing brisk business renting beer fkidges to first-years fiorn the back of his truck, regaling passers by

like a circus barker. The fiosh, forking over their money, were gleeful and raucous. Nearby, wandering packs of parents Ied their kids on tours of the alma mater, The kids wore scampering looks, sure that no one else had ever suffered the humiliation of having a couple of aging dorks in il1 fitting jellybean-coloured La Salle jackets for parents. The new parents had theirown mernories of late night piss-ups and recreationai dmg use, and were, no doubt, troubled by the implication of banners declaring: "Fathers, kiss your virgin daughters goodbye" or "Mom, al1 1 want to do is write poetry" suspended by pranksters on the highway overpasses leading into town as far west as Trenton. At night, revelling, drunken fiosh were led by upperclassmen in vulgar versions of La Salle's French fight songs. The tours paraded past the downtown hotels where parents lay, listening. The town was awash with anxiousness and relief, saturated with emotional separations.

Cut adrift from friends and familiar surroundings, fiosh are leR to faIl back on their own resources. On anything that might make them seem interesting, urbane, attractive. Often, these resources are pretty meagre. Like the girl who was telling everyone within a three tables radius about her creative use of bedding material:

- Sometimes, my ftiends and 1 pull the sheets over our heads. And we, like, even lie flowers on top of each other? And there's candles and my friend Warren, (the one who wears the Ontario Hydro vest everywhere, the one 1 was telling you about?), he reads something in

Latin. Something Catholic, if you can believe it. And there's incense and everything? And I'm lying there and 17m,Iike, this is so intense!

1 had come to the Sole to read, for the first time, the Chipman Alline. i was tired because

I'd been helping Mitchell Quist to move in, escaping after dinner when his finicky redecorating threatened my evening's work. Although 1 expected the usual Frosh Week noise levels at the

Sole, 1was in no mood to listen to adolescent biather. 1 looked ?round to see which of the fools was speaking, to shut her up with a crusty glare if possible. Instead, 1got tangled up in the gaze of another girl, sitting across fiom me, who had looked up at the same time. She rolled her weightIess, ash-coloured eyes and rnouthed the word ccf?osh"disdainfùlly before putting her head back dom into her work. I smiled shyly and resurned reading, still wom out and irritable, but at least happy to be in like-minded Company.

t**

At dawn that day, I had heard the backup beeping of a truck close by. I stuffed a pillow over my ear. Then a hom began honking. When 1 stuck rny head out the window to swear, I looked down to see Mitchell Quist standing on the lawn, his shoulders pulled up in a shmg and a cube van backed up against the front door. He hollered up:

- Morning princess! Sorry for sounding like the baying hounds of hell and al1 that, but

I locked myself out and you haven't made me a key yet. Would you mind coming down and letting me in, buddy?

- Only if you'll keep your voice down. We've got neighbours, you know. I'm pretty sure they used to be nice ones, too. 1'11 be down in a second. Just lay off the hell hom.

1 took my time since I don't, as a rule, wake up very quickly or prettily. Mitchell Quist should have known this since he'd already been living with me for two weeks. I had told Mrs.

Kendall that he was still house-hunting. Expense foms were submitted to the department right up to the end of August and I'd pocketed the money. lnstead of using it for repairs to the

Chevette, as I'd intended, 1 spent the windfall on such luxuries as a new copy of the IMand a Deutsche Gramophone recording of Aida- I kept Mitchell Quist in the dark about the deception because he could be such a pious jerk. Plus, he'd been waking up at the crack ofdawn singing shanty songs, which was rnaking me regret the whole housing deal. 1 felt no guilt over squeezing a few extra bucks out of the department.

I showed up at the door wearing a pair of traçk pants and smoking a cigarette, coffee in hand. Mitchell Quist was wearing ripped jeans and a lime-green T-shirt with a silhouette of an oil rig plastered on the fiont. He whistled,

- Jeffie, boy, you're just like Cleopatra and Helen of Troy al1 rolled into one,

- Yeah, well, if that's a truckload of bad tempered Cape Bretoners you've got out there,

Odysseus, don't bother bringingthem inside. 1 surrender already. Just promise me you'll do al1

your slaughtering and raping and pillaging and celebratory step-dancing quiet1y, okay? Some

of us Trojans have hangovers to deal with. I turned back into the house and plopped down on

the couch,

- Wish I had an army of Capers here, buddy, but 1 don't. It's just you and me and a

whoIe pile of stuffthat wants to move in here before 1 have to bring the van back. I'rn thinking that not all of it is going to fit, so we may have to reamnge some of your things. So finish your coffee, Jeffie, you'll need it for strength.

He wasn't kidding. I had expected that a lobster famer's son-turned-arpenter from the

Northern tip of a maritime province would live a spartan existence, A reasonable expectation.

It had seemed like he'd arrived in La Salle with al1 his worldly goods in hand, though 1 suppose if a cardboard box or two had followed behind him 1 wouldn't have been surprised. So when the cube van's cargo door clacked up its steel tracks to reveal enough furnishings to redecorate my entire ground floor, 1 was flabbergasted. My face must have given it away-

- Sony to throw al1 this at you without telling you first. It's just odds and sods I've collected over the years, he said, sheepishly.

Odds and sods indeed. Mitchell Quist's battered possessions included a milk-painted pine buffet (been in the famiIy for generations), an oak ice box with a set of tongs inside

(something 1 saw in Sydney, had to trade my Carnaro for it), a solid oak cupboard with

"Lunenburg Co." stencilled faintly on its backside (won it in a bet) a beaten-up stepback kitchen cabinet, also fiom Lunenburg County, that was eventually used in the kitchen to display my

collection of mismatched Corel dishes (a hand-me-down fiom grammy on my mom's side, she

was an Arsenault) and a coilection of smaller items including a butter chum, three bright,

cartoonish paintings of harbour scenes that looked as if they had been made by an ambitious

third grader and signed with the name "Lewis," a CandIe CD player sans CDS, an old KEA

wine rack with two bottles of chateauneuf-du-pape inside swaddled in crepe paper, and a marble

bust of someone who looked like Jack Benny.

- Sartre, Mitchell Quist said, heaving the thing up the stairs.

* lr *

The girl across fiom me never looked up fiom her work, but 1 found myself stealing

glances of her. Three books lay closed on the corner of her table, but only two of the spines

were tumed in my direction. One was a paperback called Smali World and the other was UZysses,

the former a book I'd never heard of and the latter a book I'd never been able to finish. Under

the incomplete rings lefi by her coffee cup was a thickish piece of white paper, one corner curled

partway up. Heavy bond, quality stuff probably tom frorn an artist's sketch book. She tucked a lock of long unbraided auburn hair behind her ear, bit her bottom lip, and reapplied the crayon

she had been using. There were more crayons in her canvas knapsack, but she only let one at a time ont0 the table.

She stamped her scuffed black combat boots slightly and bit the tip of her tongue when

she seemed to be really concentrating. Her clothes were vagrant-chic; tom and patched olive

gardening pants, a shaker-knit sweater gone to threads at the cuffs and a blue bandanna around

her throat. But fiom a distance, her eyebrows were her most striking and animated feature, dancing to the rhythm of her work. From my table, there was no way to know what she was writing or drawing, but it involved a lot of black and a touch of yellow.

A café is no place to read primary-source material on revivaIists, I concluded. There was no concentrating here. But already, fiom what I'd been able to read of Alline between the twin distractions of insipid undergrad conversations and an unusually arresting pair of eyes, the lustre on saddlebag preachers was wearing thin. 1 made up rny mind to head for the Grad Club, a more subdued setting, so that 1 could decide once and for al1 whether to turf the Methodists. Mitchell

Quist and I were scheduled to meet there in a few hours anyway. On the way out, I brushed by the girl's table,

- So, do you ever do that? she asked, simply, reaching into the knapsack.

- Do what? 1 halted.

- What that girl said. Pull the sheets over your head.

- Well, um, I sleep pretty soundly. I don? really need to pretend to be dead, 1 said.

The crayon-girl seemed less interested in me than her work, which was obscured fiom my view. As if conversation was the time-killer and doodling was sociable.

- So, what are you drawing? I asked.

More seconds than were proper passed. She looked up at me again, an eyebrow hooked upwards.

- Just a picture. I can't let you see it. It's not done.

I was forced to reappraise the situation. She was smaller than I'd realized. Pretty, but with a kind of bom-in-a-commune, socially conscious air which, though it appears outwardly sensitive, is coercive and scary. There's nothing as powerfùl as earnest consideration; people who put the needs of others before their own are generally doing so for self-serving reasons, I figure. 1 prefer irony, standoffrshness, nastiness, even. The awkwardness of the moment, and the impossibility of a parting segue left me standing, stupidly, for a moment or so; an explorer

without a map.

- Did you want a seat?

- Well, 1 was just leaving, but I'm not in a hurry.

She hurriedly put her crayon into her knapsack and folded the paper away before I could see it.

- Um, actually, 1 was Ieaving, too. Sorry. I thought you wanted my seat. I don't know why 1 thought that. You were just, sitting over there, or whatever ... Her voice traiIed off.

- You okay?

- Sorry. I'm a Little scattered. Girnmie a sec to get collected. There's just too many rowdy people around, Ail these liEle babies without their momrnies for the first time.

At Iast, an indication, She had a surly side after all.

- Yeah, 1 hate that, Undergrads drive me nuts.

- What? No, I didn't mean it like that. I feel sorry for them.

- Oh, you do?

- No. God, you're gullible.

- 1 beg your pardon?

She began snickering and pinching the bridge of her nose with one hand.

- 1 was kidding. Undergraduates sometimes drive me crazy, too. It's the whole sub- culture of suspended boy and girlhood, charged emotions, waste and privilege, plaintive calls home to mummy and daddy's wallets, the pressure-cooker of emotions. It's not at al1 what university should be about, right? Not exactly what you read in the brochures.

- Okay. I've got to collect myself. Wait a minute. 1 got up and walked back to my table and grabbed what was left of my beer before

walking back. 1approached her, swilling it Iike a martini glass and said, approximating a James

Bond burr:

- The name's MacArthur. Jeffery MacArthur. Historian- I don? believe we've met,

miss.,..

She replied in a droll Natasha-like accent, smiling broadly:

- Dunn. Diana Dunn. Literature. Licensed to deconstnict. KGB training in hand-to-

hand discourse.

- You're not kidding. I'm already wom out. 1 sat down.

- What, you thought you had me figured out fiom al1 the way over there at your little table? That's kinda funny.

- Yeah, 1 rnean, here I am, Sitting right in front of you and 1 still can't tell if you're the

Singing Nun type or the Amazon Warrior type.

- Uh-oh. Major mission faux-pas, double-oh Jeffery. Did you miss the briefing?

Women don? have to be one archetype or the other, do they? She asked, her left eye squinting and her head inclined toward me slightly.

- No, of course not, 1just meant that, well, you seemed ... Well, that is that 1 thought you might not be ...

She put her hand on my forearm and lefi it there for a moment. It felt cool, Iike a compress.

- Easy, Jeffery. I'm just having some fun with you; messing with your head a Iittle, that's all. Let's not get a11 politically hot and bothered here, You're among fkiends.

- I'rn not very sociable. - Oh, spare me the crap, you are too. Othenvise you wouldn't be here at rny table, now would you?

She had me there. But 1 could point out that this conversation wouldn7thave happened three weeks earlier, before Mitchell Quist moved into my life. But that wouldn't have meant anything to her and, in any case, I wasn't sure yet what it meant for me. Diana continued:

- Now Men. 1 have been thinking about this for a long time and 17vedevised a test of your deductive powers. I have three books in front of me here. They're al1 self-revealing in some way. One is for my thesis, one is for my course work and one is for pleasure. Guess which one is which.

Diana put the books domon the table in front of her Iike a sheIl game, laying her smaII hands on each and shuffling them. One was In mer Worlds: Essays in Culrural Politics by

Indian feminist literary critic, Gayatri Spivak. The second was Small World by David Lodge, a novel about horny, jet-setting academics as 1 later found out. The third was Illysses by James

Joyce. Diana's ashen eyes, half shut, were unreadable. Clearly this was a test. A way to see herselfthrough my eyes. But L'd had the ground shaken from under my feet at least twice already and didn7tknow what to think. Anybody who sports a copy of Ui'ysses is either incredibly complicated or incredibly insecure-- not that the two are exclusive.

- Spivak for you thesis, Lodge for pleasure and Ulysses for course work, 1 said, taking a stab at it.

- What? You think I'm a poststructuralist in a rnodernist department who reads campus novels for recreation while in university? Goodbye, Mr. MacArthur, time to turn on my crotch- cutting laser and depart the scene on a jet ski, she said, using the voice of a Bond villain.

- Ulysses for thesis, Lodge for course work, Spivak for pleasure, 1 said, quickly. - No one reads Spivak for pleasure, Lodge isn't really considered academicaliy worthy

literature, and Ulysses has been thesis-ed to death. Guess again, Jeffery,

- That leaves only Ulysses for pleasure, which 1 can't quite believe because reading it

is like spelunking in quicksand, Lodge for your thesis (but since 1 havenyteven heard of him before 1 don? know what that means) and Spivak for a course in which case, in my opinion, you should take another course. 1 can't stand al1 that postrnodernist blather.

Diana clapped her hands.

- Yes! Congratulations, Mr. MacArthur, you've solved rny cunning little test in three tries. I am a first-year MA in Literature and my thesis is, (drum roll please): T%e University

Campus in Fiction: Power, Politics and Idenfity Formation. But 1 also read Joyce for kicks, which means that I've got a kidq, siightly masochistic side, titerarily speaking. So, does that cover it? Do you know me yet, agent MacArthur? Have these books unlocked the secret of rny identity?

- Not even remotely.

- Yes, well, then my plan is working perfectly. A secret agent shouId remain mysterious and aloof. That's what gives us our deadly edge. You know, while you weren't looking, 1 poisoned one of the two beverages at this table. Guess which one?

1 took a sip fiom my Rickard's. An expression of rnock-pain crossed her face as she watched me.

- Guess 1'11 be ordering the water, then, she said.

1 laughed, coughing a little as 1 did. There was the tang of beer in my sinuses. The sensation took me back to road tripping in Tailgate with the Troops. Come to think of it, that was the last time I'd enjoyed such easy, familiar banter. The sounds around us dimmed, and 1 became aware that anyone listening in on us might tind Our conversation slightly inane. But 1 didn't care.

- Okay, Diana DUM (if that is your real narne), what's a nice, licensed-to-kill secret agent like you doing in a place like this? 1heard myself asking the question, but couldn't believe it myself. It sounded like a cheesy corne-on, but 1 didn't think it was meant to be.

She put her index finger up in the air and started waggling it, in time with her voice:

- Tut, tut. One disclosure a night, my modernist, beer-breathing fiend. You must wait until another time to learn al1 about my mission as a Sole Café subversive. She giggled, stamped and sipped a bit of coffee.

- Corne on. You have to tell me one thing about yourself, operative-to-operative. Why did yau get into literature, for example, or where you come fiom, or the name of your dog, 1said, again disbelieving my own voice.

Diana considered her options for a moment and said:

- Very well, since you asked in such a contrived and convoluted manner, 1'11 tell you this one thing. Seriously. I got into literature because 1 loved Victorian fiction as a kid, but I can't read Hardy or Dickens anymore without feeling as though 1 should be reading sornething marginal or neglected. Something good for my acadernic career. So the courses I'm taking make me feel like I should be lying back and thinking of England, if you get my drift. 1 never wanted to read books out of a sense of duty to Mother Russia or any other kind of politics.

She looked around, conspiratorially, and said with her Natasha voice:

- But please don? to be telling my superiors. I'd be on train to Siberia before you could say "Minsk."

1 was charmed, amused and knocked off centre al1 at once- Diana's personality was catchy and she had a way with words. We continued our discussion for another hour, and I

almost forgot about the Grad Club. The conversation about Dickens alone (and the shared

experience of reading him already in the fifth grade) took up most of our time together. Still,

there was something odd about her. Her discussions took abrupt tums, veering off at ninety

degree angles. Like a mention of the name "Gradgrind" sent her off on a five-minute tangent

about onomatopoeic names in the canon of British situation comedies like Fawlty Towers and

Blachdder. It was dificult for me to follow these esotenc sidebars. She could seem painfülly

contemplative and dishevelled one moment and whip to Dorothy Parker speed in a second,

which forced me to handle her in conversation like a stick of old TNT.

But fiom then on, I made a point of looking for her each time I went to the Sole. And

1 took another stab at UZysses, but was only haIfWay through it by the time of the explosion. 1

lost interest in it afierwards, its usefitlness as a shibboleth negated.

When Diana and I later reflected on this moment- Our first meeting- we Iaughed. Diana

said that she'd been uptight and a little aggressive because she'd been watching me. From the way 1 was reading,- 1 seemed stuffy, she said. A little uppity. She'd figured that 1 could probably stand to be knocked down a peg or two. That, and she'd been a little bit high. She was a regular "dope smoking fiiend of Jesus," she claimed.

As the Weed Man would Say:

- Mounds of Paradise!

Claudia Iiked to eat fish, non-fatty red meats, and sparrow-sized portions of dessert. She loved wine and liqueurs, too, but she Iived on salad. Romaine Ietîuce only, no garden-variety stuff for her. She only put the most bourgeois substances into her body. Considering her appetite for greens, it was surprising to me that she didn't like

marijuana. Diana treated it like any other herb- she even found creative ways to work it into

baked goods. 1 once tried to explain to Claudia that, as far as intoxicants go, pot is far less

addictive or damaging than alcohol, except perhaps for the Iasting effect it has on short term

memory. Though I'd not smoked up since Aftercliffe, it wasn't because of any deep seated conviction, just my own hermitic lifestyle. The fact that I'd not really spoken to anyone but archivists, landlords and professors for the previous four years.

Claudia couldn't be convinced to îake a toke. Pot is something hippie fieaks do just to feel like they're outside the system, she said, and there is no "outside" to the market economy.

To change the system you have to run it, and the way to run it is hi& finance. And in the world of high finance, one needs nice clothes, a winning attitude and a clear head. Where money was concerned, Claudia could be as clear as a radar pulse. ***

1 left the Sole by car and drove to the Grad Club. My route took me past PIaxton Hall.

The night before had been Frosh Easter, and 1 could see where the nylon ropes were still looped around the clock's hands.

Until this past year, Frosh Easter had been the capstone of the drunkapalooza that was

Frosh Week. Each year, a cabal of La Salle's sophomores met at the undergrad pub, the Fallout

Shelter, to choose a sacrificial fieshman. Painted purple fiom head to toe using purple surgical dye and wearing ceremonial robes stolen decades ago fiom the campus choir, the cabai convened in the basement murk of the Fallout Shelter after closing time to select both the ccüberfrosh"and the "scapefiosh." The criteria were nebulous, but basically any first-year student who gave a leader lip or didn't drink his share of alcohot was in the running for scapefiosh, while the überfiosh was always an attractive young woman- With targets selected, the cabal

would go out in search of the fkoshes they'd chosen. The two were treated exactly alike, which

is to say they were both made slobbenng drunk. Inebriated, they were led domUniversity Street

to Plaxton Hall, where the iiberfrosh was rewarded with a titanium crown forged by the

Engineering department and driven up and down Queen Street on a throne welded to the roof

of a van. The scapefiosh suffered the opposite fate. He was stripped to the skiwies and lashed

to the fiozen hands of PIaxton Hall's famous tirnepiece, This year, however, the scapefiosh had

been a woman. This had never happened before. The undergrad paper, The Chimes, was livid,

Sexism! Misogyny! Barbarity! The charges were made with a kind of polemicai wrath

unprecedented for La Salle, which ordinarily prides itself on being prim and refined. The debate

and administrative band-wringing was to last several months and ended with the expulsion of

the cabal ftom La Salle in late February and a highly publicised criminal trial thereafter. The

cabal's sentence for assault was handed down one week afier the plane crash, pushing my story

out of the papers.

When 1 arrived at the Grad Club, Mitchell Quist was already there.

1 have been at La Salle long enough to instantly place a graduate student on a continuum

fiom first year MA student to post-doctoral student within three sentences of conversation.

Students enter graduate degrees ail spit-and-polish, full of heady anticipation and vigour. They

dominate conversations around the Grad Club pool table like railway tycoons or big-game

hunters, swigging their many pints of Dragon's Breath pale ale with elan. PhD students occupy

the outer fringes of the pub beyond the pool table, dressed in skirts or jeans dating back three

years. They're reticent and nurse glasses of scotch or red wine with grim smiles. Then there are the post-docs. This last type is seldom seen in the Grad Club, since they are depressed beyond the simple cornforts of strong drink. They know how close they are to the front lines.

MitcheIl Quist was seated in the middle of a long table with MA students surrounding him. His voice pierced the din with its resonance.

- No, I'm telling you, the Loyalists were never as anti-American as al1 that. A lot of them saw the re-creation of the British parliamentary mode1 as the wrong choice for Canada. A good chunk of the Loyalists wanted us to be a republic.

He spotted me-

- Hey there, Jefie buddy! Okay folks, here cornes a real historian. He'll set you folks right straight. Jeffie, were the Loyalists anti-American or were they pro-British? Seems we have a dispute on Our hands here.

It was enough to make me rhapsodize about the good old days of arguing battleship names with Fencepost. As the reigning grand old man of Master's students, though, I was forced to weigh in. The new MA students introduced themselves one by one and looked at me expectantly. 1 threw Mitchell Quist a disdainhl stare and launched my attack.

- Actually, they were neither, 1 began, By the end of my lecture, 1 had convinced

Mitchell Quist's acolytes that the Loyalists were both anti-American and pro-British, but ought more properly to be caIIed proto-Canadian. Through it all, Mitchell Quist remained uncharacteristically difident, especially consiaering that the Loyalists were his specialty, not mine.

By the end, the new graduate students wore glazed-over looks on their faces, 1 had thrown each of them to the mat in succession and they were tired. Though 1 despise the hairsplitting of purely academic disputation, I've Ieamed al1 the punches and throws and 1'11 use them if 1 have to defend myseIf in an argument. 1'11 occasionally even initiate a debate if t'm quite sure that 1'11 win and if it will stop other people fiom chittering Iike caffeinated squirrels.

Other people's ignorance and foibles often waste my time, and I take time far too seriously for that.

As most of the new grad students filed away meekly, Mitchell Quist mimed applause.

- Weil done, Jeffie. 1 don't know how you did it, but you just alienated everyone at the table. You'll make a fine scholar.

How was 1 supposed to take that?

- History isn't simple, you know, itrs really a complex web of. .. - Cause and effect. Mitchell Quist finished my sentence.

- How'd you know 1 was going to Say that?

- That's what you always Say. If I've heard it twice in the last couple of weeks I've heard it a thousand times.

1 couldn't remember saying it. Then again, we'd been at the Sole oflen enough for it to have come up.

- People aren't interested in compiex cause and effect, Jefie. They hate nuances. What are you going to do about that?

- I don't see why 1 should have to do anything about it. if people want to live in ignorance of the Loyalists or maritime revivalism or anything else, what does it rnatter to me?

- So you just want to write histoty for other historians? You certainly npped a stnp off the people at this table, and they're at the same level of education as you. Can't imagine how you'd fare mixing it up with the great unwashed outside the campus.

- You said it yourself.' John Q. Public isn't interested in nuance, and real history, the kind of stuff that you and I study, is complex. They're not going to 'get' it no matter how much

13 I we might want them to. People these days have CNN-shortened, sound bite length attention spans and can't upload complicated information. So let them a11 rot, if that's what they want.

- So history is elitist?

- Yes.

- Should it be?

- I'm not going to get into an is-ought fight with you. People have no use for real history.

Canadians never get beyond saying how boring their own story is, or, at the very best, they entrench themselves in the old FrenchEnglish or Nativemon-native dichotomies and go on, half-cocked, about how their distinct society has been crushed or how the whining Frogs get everything they want. That's the infantile level of political discussion in Canada. In the States it's not much better. The NRA clinging to an amendment written to promote citizen militias in the post-Revolutionary era that makes no sense in an age of chernical weapons and srnart bombs.

Fuzzy-headed Democrats who think that access to education and health care is going to make race problems go away. And the whole discussion moderated by Ted Koppel and Peter

Mansbridge, titans of intellect both. Sure, it'd be great ifeveryone reaIized the hegemonic forces at work that are poisoning the air, killing Iraqi babies and cooking the ground we waik on like a tortilla. But 1 don't see how, even if 1 wanted to, 1 could change the minds of an entire North

American culture to draw back fiom the abyss.

- Maybe that's your problem, Jefie. Maybe you don't believe enough. Not enough priya. Not enough devotion to the cause.

I was heating up. 1 could feel rny stornach tuming and my forehead breaking out in a line of sweat.

- One person doesn't make any difference. - You don't even listen to yourself, do you, buddy? On the one hand you Say the whole jumping cosmos is cornplex. In the very next breath you Say that the individual can't change

anything. If the universe is cornplex, you can't possibly Say that one person is incapable of

effecting change, particularly if that one person has access to the power of language. Look at

the Judeo-Christian tradition. The first regulatory action of Adam in the garden was naming.

History is the stniggle to name, to reie-- so history should be primal, central for our culture. It's

not popular at the moment, but you and 1 can change that. Put people in touch with the stories that tell thern who they really are. Just parcelling it out in little slices to oursehes or squatting on it is about as usefiri as a sack of wet mice.

- That's an elitist position, because you wouldn't have arrived at it if you weren't so removed fiom the hoipolloi. The average person simply isn't interested in history. The best we can hope for is the trickle-down effect.

- And you would be different fiom every other scholastic historian in what way? That's what nearly everybody does; preaching to the converted, ducking responsibility. Corne on, boy, why not popularize? Why not carry a thousand-watt light right down Queen Street? Cal1 out names of the beasts at the gate: Exxon, Microsoff, Heineken?

My legs started to shake under the table.

- 1won't get up on a soapbox and start Iecturing because the cornmon man is an ass. It's pearls before swine. 1 should know, I grew up with enough of them.

- What about Morgan?

- He's the son of a professor. He's hardly typical in any sense of the word. And 1 stili don? think that your yakking at him "shifted his paradigrn" or "adjusted his karma."

- 1'11 let you in on a little secret, Jefie. You don't believe what you just said one bit. You know exactly how much the Iife of one person is worth and you're just chicken-shit scared to admit it Because it means that you're responsible for other people. And for what you do to them. And that's the last thing you want to be.

1 pointed at him. My index finger was quiverhg as I spoke.

- Back off, mister, you're over the Iine, now. You've known me for all of two weeks.

You don't know the first thing about me and how 1 see the world. 1 don't appreciate your hypothesizing it, either. How about we tum this around? I'm not the one who's down on popular culture. The one with the whole Hindu holy book in my head and fucking marble bust of Sartre in my bedroom. Maybe you should start explaining yourself.

A fireball sialed from my pointed finger over Mitchell Quist's shoulder, exploding against the wall across the room. A picture became immolated right in its hme, leaving a rectangulur smudge behind. A woman sitting at the table underneath it was also hit, disappearing in a clattering heap of skull and bone under the table. The waiter, on his way to serve her, slowed dommid-stride, dropped his tray of drinks and grabbed his back. In a second he had fallen over out of view. In distant corners of the Grad Club, the smashing of glass could be heard and the smell of burning human hair was thick and acrid. I could feel a cold wind churning nearby. 1 looked down at the table and shut my eyes for a moment. I'd not created a conflagration like this one for some time. But Mitchell Quist sat caimly through it, unaware and unmoved. He said:

- This isn't about me. It's about you- what Jeffie really believes. The Gita says that a person has the self as his only friend when he has conquered himself, but if he rejects his own reality the self will war against him.

He didn't know, 1 thought, with whom he was dealing. The heat dissipated from my forehead. My legs stopped trembling. 1 was able to take a sip of beer and resume speaking,

though the liquid hissed in my mouth like a hot pan in a sink.

- The only problem 1 have is with people telling me what to believe. 1 told you: 1 know

al1 about the common man and what's important to him. You're rïght: most people don't give

a rat's ass that the whole world is coming apart as long as they've got cars and video garnes and

beer. But neither do 1. natmuch 1 know about myself, you deconstructing, Hindu-quoting

prick. So buy me another round, al1 this highfalutin nonsense has made my mouth dry.

1 felt as though 1 was being scrutinized from sornewhere nearby. 1 was. Only one of the

master's students from Mitchell Quist's coterie remained. He was a tubby little fellow with long

hair, giasses and a familiar air about him. He was leaning into the conversation, but seemed

more interested in me, specifically. 1 turned to him and mimicked an interviewer's voice:

- There appear to be two questions on the table, sir. Are an individual's words important

in a complex universe? And will someone buy me a beer? Matdo you think?

The master's student leaned back in his chair, took off his glasses, rubbed them with his

T-shirt and regarded me with one languid glance.

- I think 1 know you.

1 knew him, too, 1 found out. His narne was Wilf Sorge. He was the kid being chased across the grave1 by Marc Riopelle at the Horton pig roast. * * *

Life in a small town had never been dull. City folk think that small towns are pastoral

little enclaves of long forgotten values. Just listen to George Bush or Preston Manning sometime, those twin sons of privilege posing as cornmoners. They've never iived the kind of

lifestyle they spend so much time extolling. The bare fact is that small towns are microcosms of the world; filled in miniature with al1 the vices that flesh is heir to.

Because our tesources were limited, my fiends and I had to be creative. Arrned with

our false-bottomed cassette case of drugs, The Troops and 1 stole Street signs., painted obscene

graffitti on cattle, shoplifted, blasted maiIboxes in drive-by shootings, and (in Weed and

Fencepost's case) seduced nervous thirteen year-olds.

A11 of us were fiom religious families. The Weed Man was Catholic. Bnan went to the

all-Dutch church on the edge of town. 1 read my way through the entire Bible during successive

morïbund Presbyterian services led by The Reverend. Ironically, we al1 despised the liberal

United Church: the Presbyterians because they had wanted to swallow us up in 1925, the Dutch

because the United Church tolerated homosexuals and the Cathoiics because they were their

Iargest Protestant cornpetitor for souls.

Wilf Sorge went to St. Peter's Anglican, which was where the old money and establishment worshipped. His group of fiiends at Aftercliffe High was two orthree years my junior. His upbringing was sirnilar to mine, except for the denominational labels. My journey was similar to Wilf Sorge's, it tumed out. Both of us gave up on our rural roots and churchy backgrounds, and both of us were debris that had been blown out of AftercliEe afier a familial explosion. ***

Wilfand 1reminisced about Aftercliffe. Country Tyme Donuts. Our history teacher, Mr.

Whitehead, who had encouraged both of us to study history. Mitchell Quist tried to seize on this since it proved his point, but 1 cut him off. I had to shift the conversation again when we got to

Wally Horton's pig roast and dangerously close to the Reverend's sermon on the Iawn. 1 veered cIear of it because Mitchell Quist was perched on the edge of his chair, taking everything in. Instead 1 got Wilf to give me a participant's eye view of the altercation with Riopelle. Though

he didn't specifically remember knocking me over, he did remember hearïng a IittIe explosion

behind him. He'd looked behind to see if Riopelle was shooting at him. Not as farfetched as

it might sound, given the rifles-to-redneck ratio in the town, we agreed. I asked him what was new.

- Well, about four years ago 1 finally came out of the closet, Wilf said. A conversational land-mine. He checked my face for signs of disapproval.

The news surprised me. Not because I'm hornophobic. 1 might have been for a while afier the incident at the pool, but that had been temporary and a Meunderstandable given my age and the circumstances. 1 was surprised, I said, because 1 remembered that Wilf had propositioned Marc Riopelle's girl. He chortled.

- Oh, that. Actually, Marc's girlfiend and 1 were just talking. In fact, she had just finished telling me that Marc sometimes hit her. 1 had my arms around her when the oaf burst into the bedroom and chased me around the bed and out the door. She was really quite nice, you know, if you could get past the whoie Sarah, Plain und Taii sentimentality and the godafil

Farrah Fawcett 'do she sported.

Mitchell Quist was intrigued and butted in.

- So, what was it like, growing up gay in a smalt town?

Wilf laughed.

- Not as bad as the movie-of-the-week. No tragic suicides, no bashing or poleaxing to speak of. It wasn't exactly last cal1 at Club 54, don't get me wrong, but 1 made a couple of discreet fnends there. We just kept quiet and made damn sure that no one suspected. We drank and drove and did the heavy meta1 vomit circuit just Iike everyone else. But the incident with Riopelle's girl provided me with some invaluable cover, People saw me as quite the notonous little studrnufin afterwards.

WiIf told us about the clandestine games he played with his parents. He had to invent girls Po go out on dates with. He and his fnends had to make a Iot of trips out of town. Most importantly, he had to keep scanda1 away fiom his father, a successful lawyer. He had managed, which in itself was a rare feat of discretion in a gossipy little town.

- So, have you ever been back? 1 know Jefie here doesn't feel Iike he can ever go home again.

I had never told Mitchell Quist anything of the sort, and his comment gave me a chiil.

Before today, 1 hadn't even mentioned Aftercliffe, let alone the Weed Man, Fencepost or my farnily, for that matter, which is how 1 wanted to keep it. There was a possibility that Mitchell

Quist could squeeze some information out of Wilf, (perhaps he already had) but Wilf and I had moved in such different circles back home that 1 doubted that he would have much to offer.

Mitchell Quist's question made Wilf go distant for a moment. The topic was personal; why dredge up pain Like that? 1 suspected that Mitchetl Quist was piloting the conversation into religious waters, or that he was going to quote Foucault's HrSrovof Semuiiy chapter and verse.

Wilf didn't seem put out, though he did clear his throat before he answered.

- 1 don't think my parents ever want to see me again. The last time 1visited home, 1 told them everything. My fathet screamed bloody rnurder. My mother cried. They wrote me out of the family will on the spot. The whole thing was quite traumatic for them, I'm sure, he added

W~Y-

- So much for AdAs~aper aspera, eh? said Mitchell Quist.

- Come again? asked Wilf. - The Latin proverb. It means "To the stars through hardships," Mitchell Quist said.

- I've always liked "no pain, no palm; no thoms, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross no crown."

- De La Rochefoucauld? Mitchell Quist asked. - William Penn, Wilf said.

- Right. No pain, no palm. Sounds Iike a recipe for a life of quiet desperation.

- Exactly. I'm not one to suffer quietly. Do you know what 1 told Riopelle's girlfkiend the night of the pig roast? Stand up to him, 1 said. Of course, that was just before 1 dinged rny head on a truck door running away Iike a wee girl. StilI, I could probabty take a little of rny own medicine right now. Wilf s irenic streak took sorne of the tension out of the room that had ratcheted up between Mitchell Quist's intmsiveness and my defensiveness. It made me wish I'd known him better when we were in Aftercliffe, and 1 said so as he got up to leave.

- Thanks. Me too. But before 1 go, I have a concrete point to contribute to that opaque philosophical discussion the two of you were having; the stuffabout the measure of a single person's influence? Think about Karl HOU. A Gerrnan Lutheran writes a book about how

Martin Luther singlehandedly started the Reformation and for a long time even the Catholics believe it. And don't even get me started on Max Weber.

Two weeks Iater, Mr. and Mrs. Sorge had dinner with their son in downtown La Salle.

It didn't go well, but it ended well, which is the main thing. * * *

Morris Blijver is attending a conference in Wheaton, Illinois. That's just as well. Before he le& he confionted me (less chantably than usual) about my research. This time, 1 didn't have a snappy retort prepared for him, and he was curt; show some work soon or you're cut off. The negotiation game is over. But how am 1going to explain that my research time has been hijacked by more important work? Writing this report is a fiilkirne job. I'm such a regufar at the Sole lately that Clarence jokes about engraving my name on a brass plate at my table. He says this to me as he's standing on a ladder in the middle of the room. It looks as though he's going to be hanging a new piece of art fiom the ceiling. 1 ask him what he's doing and he says that 1'11 see it clearly soon enough and to be patient, buddy.

Does everyone in this town sound Iike Mitchell Quist now, or what? ***

We were sitting at this very table the night that Mitchell Quist met Claudia Lefebvre.

1 had finished the Iast DuMaurier in my pack an hour before. I was squirming in rny chair. The "cm you spare a smoke for a quarter" moment experienced by every tobacco addict was nearing. Our conversation had veered from Irish immigration and was headed for philosophical territory, and 1 needed a smoke. 1 was belligerent.

- I'm not saying that you badgered Wilf, exactly, but you keep sticking your nose into people's lives-- Morgan. Wilf. And that attack on my character just before you started in on

Sorge. What makes you so certain that you have insight into what makes strangers tick?

While I had been talking, he was etching a diagram into the loose vamish on the table.

1 hoped Clarence wouldn't see it. He frowns on vandalism. Mitchell Quist pulled his hand away. What I saw looked like a side profile of Saturn's rings. He pushed away fiom the table.

- Imagine, Jeffie, a 8at world. Everything is two dimensional, al1 lines, squares and squiggles. The squares and squiggles go about their square and squiggly business when, one fine two-dimensional day, a point appears in the middle of the earth. Gradually, it swells into a great blue circle the size of an ocean before it shrinks again into a single point and vanishes. Poof? That's how it appears to a two-dimensional person. Here he pointed to his diagram.

- What is actually happening to our two-dimensional buddies is that a sphere is passing through their plane of existence. One Iittle square, a prophet, believes that such a thing as a sphere exists and the belief spreads. However, except for indirect evidence, there is no proof that spheres are real. He patted the diagram, as if rewarding a faithfil dog for a most excellent tric k.

- But imagine, JefEe, if you were able to see the sphere. To put it into words. Wouldn't that give you a tremendous power?

- God-like, yeah. Where are you going with this?

Just then, Diana Dunn plunged through the Sole's door. The smoke from the ashtrays and candles eddied and riffled playfirliy in her wake. She carried her farniliar canvas knapsack.

Her long hair was braided in the back. She walked quickly at first and then slowed, searching for a seat. It was Mitchell Quist who waved her over, after he had noticed where I was looking.

- Do you know her? 1 asked. There was a Sour taste in the back of my mouth. Jealousy.

- Not exactiy.

When she arrived, she seemed as befuddled as the last tirne-

- Hey, she said.

- Hey yourself. Have a seat. 1 introduced Diana to Mitchell Quist.

She looked at the table, looked further down into the darker recesses of the café and sat.

She hovered on the edge of her chair, as if uncommitted to a long visit.

- So, what's your mission for today?

- Sorry?

- The KGB, the secret agent stuff? Nothing.

- Okay, what about the pichrre you were drawing the last time 1 was in here?

- Hrnm? she replied, biting her upper lip.

- The one in crayon. Did you finish it?

- Can't Say 1 have. Don't really remember which one I was working on at the time.

Speaking of time, what is it?

- It's 8 PM. Mitchell Quist did the repIying for me, which was fortunate because I'd misinterpreted the question. I was still partly in philosophical mode and would have given her a useless, though thought provoking, answer.

Diana had seized my beer glass. She was peerïng icto it with one eye, Iike a microscope.

1 looked over at Mitchell Quist. He shmgged. He didn't know what the game was, either.

Suddenly, she gave an excited little squeal and grabbed me by the wrist, yanking me close.

- Check it out! She passed me the beer glass.

My face must have broadcast my puzzlement. Mitchell Quist smirked. 1 Iooked plaintively at Diana. She pointed at the glass, still giggling.

I set my eye againçt the rim. Suds. Al1 1 saw were suds in the glass. If there was a joke here, I was out of it.

- Can't you see? In the foam. There's a fiog on a lily pad. Plain as day. Here, lemme show you. And she wrenched the gIass away.

The Guinness swilled and the fioth hit me in the eye. Without the ocular to rest my eye upon, my head whumped domon the table top. Pandemonium. Mitchell Quist was practically on the floor. Diana was patting my eye with her Iittle hands with a chorus of "sorry, ohmigod, sorry." 1 didn't laugh right away, but eventually felt pressured to. Had 1 known then that she'd been smoking up before coming to the bar, I might have felt more charibbly about her erratic

behaviour, but it wouldn't have excused Mitchell Quist.

By the end of the hour, the three of us had settled down and the scene became more

domestic. We were into comfortable universiv banter by then. Mitchell Quist pursued his usual

1ine of relentless personal questioning, but Diana deflected almost every question with oflhanded

wit. She asked him about his own interests and background, which he answered curtly before asking her another question. It seemed like a test of wills to me. Still, he managed to get one detail out of her by offering her a Moosehead or a Dragon's Breath. She didn't drink, she said, and got up abruptly.

- Um, sorry, but 1 promised my housemate I'd go out dancing with her later. She's just finishing up practise at the gym and I have to go get her. Diana checked her watch. Punctuality seemed important to her at the moment, which rnight have explained her behaviour, which was a different nervous energy than the kind she'd exuded before. There was wony in the mix.

We offered to walk with her. Night was coming on and ever since Frosh Easter, there had been a few attacks on women near Ashbumham Park. Diana seemed indigerent to our

Company, which we took as an invitation. ***

1 knew MitcheIt Quist thought 1 was too soused to drive (in truth, 1 was, but that had never stopped me before), so my Chevette rernained parked in the lot. The athletic centre lay in the opposite direction from our house, and we walked. Mitchell Quist seemed determined to get me into shape with al1 his traipsing. I'd already worn out a set ofNikes i'd owned since third year.

A cold, pattering drizzle had begun puddling up in pavement divots and concrete gutters. 1 pulled my collar up, but the other two welcomed it with Gene Kelly fnvolity. Beside each other, Mitchell Quist and Diana were a bug and a bear; he with long loping strides and she with busy little steps. We followed a familiar route down Queen's Street, and passed Crazy Bob on the way.

Last time, he had leaned on the rubbish can Iike a parody of Rodin's thinker. This time, the trash can served as a podium. He stnick a lecturer's pose, or a parody of one. His voice was not the breathy, tentative drafi it had been. He was an orator, and spoke with a Kennedyesque swagger. But his matted and mu* appearance said that he was still, to quote the Weed Man,

"crazy chewing wood."

- Let us descend into the sightless world, he intoned to no one in particular, though we were the only ones near enough to hear him.

- Observe the one who cornes with sword in hand, leading the three as if he were their master! His speech reached a crescendo and failed as abruptly as it had begun. He hoarked a loogie into his podium, smacking at the min that beaded off his beard and dribbled away. Only a deferential nod at Mitchell Quist showed that he was aware of us. 1 spoke up as droplets of cold water coursed down the nape of my neck:

- Living in this town, is like living in granola. Nothing but nuts and flakes.

- There's a whole literary tradition of wise fools, you know, said Diana, matter of factly.

- Your point?

- If there's one thing I've leamed fiom studying Iiterature is that sometimes people are marginalized because they have nothing to Say. And sometimes it's because they frighten the status quo.

1 apologized without rneaning it. Mitchell Quist seconded ~iana'sidea. She said that her ideas didn't need seconders for validation. I'd never seen Mitchell Quist so stunned. Diana

saw it, too, and apologized for being abrupt. Said that it had nothing to do with us, it was just

that she couldn't stand it when people made fun of the unfortunate. 1 reminded her that she'd

mocked the undergrads a few days before.

- Totally different. Pnvilege protects them after all, she added.

1had to agree with her, 1said, not that she needed a seconder. She nudged me playfully

after that. Mitchell Quist went dead quiet, dropping back a few steps as if to analyse Diana.

Like some creature that's been swatted off, looking for another opening. 1don't think he knew

what to make of her, which seemed like the reaction she was used to eliciting.

We were nearing the courthouse. Diana stopped. Mitchell Quist and 1 stopped. She

bent over and exarnined the sidewalk. Dozens of woms, some of them pulped by pedesaians,

had tunnelled out of the grass and were futilely wiggling through shallow puddles. Some were

swollen like overcooked noodles. She cupped one in her hands and shooed it out of harm's way.

- Diana Dunn, secret agent/worrn-god, I remarked offhandedly.

- Sorry? She wiped her dirty palms on her pant leg. - It's predestination. You've saved one little worm and damned the hundreds of others

slitherïng pitifully to their doom. You're their god.

- Stick to cultural necrophilia, MacArthur. You obviously don't know biology very well.

- Whatever do you mean, your goddessness? I asked, more causticaIIy than I meant it.

Diana hung her head back and huffed an exasperated little sigh into the air. She was on the brink of explaining herself when she spied a visual aid. With a flick of her neck that said

"follow," she darted down the Street towards Ashburnham Park. Mitchell Quist and 1 sauntered

behind her. It occurred to me that he and Diana were both in the habit of dashing away. Neither of us said anything as we walked.

By now, it was nearly 9 PM and the darkness was as complete as it was going to get.

The courthouse was illuminated by blue floodlights, and looked sepulchral. Its great multi- bowled fountain was turned off for the night, and without its familiar burbling a gap opened in the usual park noises. Diana stood alone in the middle of the grass, a statue of herself.

She hissed as we approached.

- Shh! Stand still and listen. Close your eyes, it helps.

I wasn't sure what I was listening for. The min had nearly stopped. There was the familiar &one of city traffic. The highway in the distance. A scent of maple trees and moist decomposition. The suddeniy loud patter of drops plashing against leaves. But underneath that sound I detected something else. Something like sucking, or someone popping plastic bubble- packaging in a distant roorn. E had to strain to hear it, but 1 wasn't imagining.

Diana spoke.

- This is my mother's gift to me. She Ioved everything that grew out of the soil. 1 didn't believe it myself, at first.

I still had my eyes closed and her voice was narrating a dream.

- The ground is sponging up the rain. You're hearing the water settle into little pores in the soil. The earth gets saturated, so the woms crawl up out of it.

I opened my eyes. A lock of Diana's hair had worked fiee and clung to her cheek. Her stare was direct, wild. Water ran in rivulets down her exposed neck and across the backs of her dangling hands, dripping silently fiom her fingers to the ground. The scent of her sweat was in the air, as though the min had unlocked it hmher pores and her damp clothes. For a moment she didn't speak, her gaze Iocked so deeply with mine I thought I might be smothered fiom the inside. I didn't breathe, afraid the comection would sever.

- Mom said: Leave a worm in the wet earth and it drowns. Take a worm offthe sidewalk

and put it in the grass. It won? get squashed. Inaction is the thinp that kills.

That was the moment when everything dissolved. Mitchell Quist, the courthouse and

the floodlights melted. The ground vanished except for the isthmus of spongy mud between

Diana and me. That was the moment that 1 knew sornething remarkable was going to happen

and that Diana was a big part of it. 1 knew because my fingers wanted to weave with hers. 1

needed to burrow into her body because she knew the secret of tuming a field into a planet and could cup time in her palm. 1 wanted to taste the moist drops above her eyebrows, breathe the atmosphere that clung around her. That was the moment my skin fell away in scales. My body cooled as the Iast of the rain seeped in through welcoming pores. ***

1 could have spent the whole night there. But Diana led us to the gym. 1 felt as though

I'd travelled halfWay home and had tumed back, and it ached in me. 1 wanted to go home and listen to some Verdi, or Gluck in the dark with a glas of Mitchell Quist's chateauneuf du pape.

The last place 1 wanted to go was the athletic centre. ***

Competition jumps you the second you're inside the athletic centre. When you enter the building, you're bombarded with three smells simultaneously. From your left side, chlorine spills towards you from the pool-- a smell with al1 kinds of unhappy associations for me. From your right side, there's an icy whiff like the stale fieezer compariment of a frigidaire. That's the arena. Straight ahead, gyrn socks, smelly armpits and moist crotches assault you. That's where we were headed. White bodies moved back and forth across the oval-shaped La Salle Fleur de Lys crest

in the middle of the gyrn floor. Shouts of "en garde!" and "allez!" were followed by a tinny clash

of metal as the fencers pitched their bodies at one another, weapons waving like a field of car

antennas. Diana in the lead, we skirted the edge of the court and found ourseIves in a corner,

watching one match in particular.

Two fencers, obviously women, stood at opposite ends of a narrow copper mat or piste.

Both wore mesh masks and were dressed in form-fitting white pants and jackets. Wires that

stretched out behind their uniforms were plugged into an electrical sconng apparatus. At the

moment, they were jacking in their weapons, testing them by jabbing the tip against iiic points

of their shoes, which set off a buzzer. The woman farther fiom us was the shorter of the two.

They seemed ready. A judge beside the piste bellowed:

- En garde!

The fencers raised their swords in front of their mask. Each extended her fi-ee hand

behind and away from her head and assumed a crouched position. The judge bellowed "allez!"

and the match began. A long reach would be an advantage, 1 observed.

They lunged. The fencer near us parried. The shorter woman was off balance. A thrust

stnick her sword arrn. The buzzer sounded,

Two more times, the women flew at each other. Each bout lasted mere seconds. The

thrusts and parries were ferocious and lightning-quick, not like the languid theatrical swordplay

of an Errol Flynn movie. The piste squeaked with the sound of pivoting shoes. The women grunted and growted. Both times, the woman nearest us feinted and stmck her opponent with

unnerving control. At the end of the third bout, the loser swore loudly as the buzzer sounded.

She was still fiinous when the final bout started. She slashed at the air. Her mask bobbed fkom side to side. Her opponent stood cooly, her fiee hand already upraised before the

command to begin.

The "allez!" was barely in the air when the smalier fencer screamed. Her weapon was

held straight out. A stinger. She came straight at her opponent. With a neat sidestep, the atîack was parried. When the shorter woman tumed, she was slashed across the hands and then jabbed smartly on the toe as she recoiled. The buzzer sounded. The defeated fencer shouted:

- That was a foul, you bitch! and whipped her mask at the floor. It bounced neatly away.

She was spitting cIaws and razors. She swore again and stumped to the change room, mbbing the back of her hand. She flipped the taller woman the bird just before exiting.

Nearby, the winner removed her mask and shook her blond hair out. A high forehead and cheekbones glimmered with perspiration. Except for dilated pupils that nearly swallowed the blue of her eyes, her expression betrayed neither pieasure nor strain. It was the blasé face of someone adrnired and hated for a whole lifetime. She began removing her gloves, tugging a finger at a time.

When Claudia caught sight of me, the memory of her breasts, now nearly concealed by her vest, and her tight, white pants clinging to her confident body sent a spurt of hot blood coursing, invo luntarily, to my groin. Diana had her arms folded across her stomach, watching me. 1 felt flushed.

Suddenly, behind me, Mitchell Quist swore.

1 looked to see him turned away. Hunched over. When 1got to hirn, his usual placidity was gone. His face was contorted. White knuckles protruded fiom his clenched fists. 1 demanded to know what was wrong. He gasped a little. I thought he was having some kind of asthmatic attack. His eyes were swivelling back and forth. It seemed for a second that he might pass out. 1 led him into the corridor. In a moment, his breathing was steadier, but he still looked

panicked,

- Jesus Christ, what the devil is wrong?

Mitchell Quist put a hand on my shoulder to steady himself as he began to stand upright.

- 1 know that woman.

This was nothing like my body's reaction to Claudia. I would have Iaughed if he hadn't appeared so shaken. Whatever his problem was, it was an eerie one.

- Big deal, I know her, too. Her name's Ciaudia. We met at the train station. 1 drove her home. To tell you the truth, I've been fantasizing about her ever since. 1 mean, she takes my breath away, too, but not like this.

- No, JetXe. 1mean 1 really know her. 1 know that she's bad news, buddy. 1 felt like the wind was waving the grass on my grave just now. God, I thought it might not have to end this way but I guess the fat's in the fire now.

A tiny wave of electricity jolted the hairs on my body upright. Neither of them had attended La Salle in the past. 1 knew that. He couldn't possibly mean what I thought he meant.

- Bullshit. You're just being melodramatic. 1don't know why, but knock it off. I'm not buying it.

- And I'm telling you-- I'm putting the tnith, the future, into words. That's what I do.

1 don't mock your myth. Don't doubt mine.

My mind went inert. The obscenity 1 shouted at him reverberated in the narrow ha11 and hung motionless in the air aftelwards. The next event 1 recall is my own shaking fingers striking a match against the athletic centre's limestone outer wall. I left Mitchell Quist where he was and walked home alone, chain smoking. Thematic and Theoretical Considerations

Plot:

Before any discussion of theme or narrative strategy can begin, the remainder of A

Touch of Fire's plot has to be revealed. The novel continues along its three time lines,

(distant past, near past and present), until the past is gathered up in the present at the

conclusion.

In the distant-past time line, we learn that the "company" in the Reverend's office is

a woman, a member of the AAC. Jeffery spies them inflagrante delicto and, feeling

betrayed, he arranges for Mr. Momson (the Presbyterian restaurant orner pitted against the

MC)to enter the house and catch the Reverend in the act, MO~SO~agrees to keep things

quiet in the community if the AAC agrees to disband. The woman Ieaves town. The

MacArthur household is shaken, but the Reverend never finds out about the role Jeffery plays. The AAC disbands. Jeffery's touch of fire makes its first appearance, propelled by his betrayal. He settles into a quiet life in La Salle, trying hard to reduce contact with others or with changeable environments, both of which ampli@ his visions of immolation.

In the near-past time line, the relationships among the four principal characters are further explored. Claudia's character is developed; superficially at first (stressing her cornpetitive and social-climbing behavior) but as the novel unfolds, we Learn the truth about her background. Actually the daughter of a divorced elevator repairman, (and not the daughter of Bay Street financiers as she daims), she wants to use the office towers she visited as a child when accompanying her father on service calls to transcend her working- class roots. Complicating this ambition is her attraction to Mitchell Quist, whom she suspects is not who he appears to be. Her preoccupation with his social standing (and his resistance to her) leads her to neglect her MBA, putîing her life into a tailspin.

Diana's past is delivered straightforwardly. Her father is living out West and her mother was a member of the "Saanich Six," a terrorist ce11 which was responsible for the bombing of a cruise missile plant in the 1980's. Currently she's being held in La Salle's

Prison for Women, her sentence extended because she threw a tomato at the judge during her trial (an actual event during the sentencing of the "Squamish Five" in 1982). Diana is at La

Salle to be close to her rnother and to explore a gentler kind of social activisrn, one that embodies her mother's ideals without violence. Her relationship with Jeffery is complicated, but remains at the level of fi-ïendship. When Claudia begins violently falling apart, Diana stays the night at Jeffery's, where he discovers the crayon drawing in her purse- a bridge- eye view of Mitchell Quist's dip into the La Salle river.

Mitchell Quist's prophetic abilities are explained late in the novel. He's actually the son of an east-coast oil baron, David O'Quist, whose Company has a near monopoly in the

Maritimes (eg. Irving Oit). In his first attempt to leave his family's conspicuous consumption behind, Mitchell Quist had moved into La Salle and taken a job as a night janitor in Trent Hall. Because he has siRed through the files and trash of faculty members and students, he has gained the ability to "know" people before meeting them. He is helped by his lover/boss, Randa Keller, whose persona1 knowledge of Jeffery paves the way for the events of the early chapters. Randa reveals herself to Jeffery when Mitchell Quist becomes involved with Claudia, and the revelation of his duplicities also contributes to Claudia's demise. However, some ambiguity surrounds Mitchell Quist despite his attempt to defiaud.

His c'€oreknowIedge"of Claudia and the crayon drawing, (which shows that he knew that

Diana and Claudia would be on the bridge during the Feast of the Hungry Ghosts) remain unexplained.

As the strands of the near and distant past catch up to kffery's present, he begins to feel additional pressure to go to Acadia and begin his thesis. However, his memoir (the novel) first has to reach its conclusion. He reveals that Claudia had called Mitchell Quist early on the rnoming of the crash. Concemed about her, Mitchell Quist goes to find her and takes Jeffery's car. Meanwhile, Jeffery goes to campus and when he returns, he sees the spectacle that opens the book. It's immediately clear that Claudia was flying the plane.

What Jeffery does not know at first is if Mitchell Quist was with her at the time of the crash and whether Diana was stiIl in the house. Though the reader expects that al1 three have died, we discover that Diana had gone home in response to a cal1 Claudia had made from the airport and Mitchell Quist is delayed by Jeffery's famously unreliable Chevette.

Diana leaves after the funeral on a quest to find her father. Mitchell Quist departs for

Nova Scotia, but not before a final speech to Jeffery. In the nove17sfinal scene, JeRery is sitting in the La Salle airport waiting for a flight to take him to the east Coast. As he reflects, the narrative voice shifls between past, present and fiiture. He considers the flight ahead, a swim in the ocean with Mitchell Quist and leaving his home turf for the first time in years.

And he reaches/reached/will reach for a payphone, recalling the Allinian notion that, for the redeemed, there is no sense of tirne and space, although the witness of his transformation (the person on the other end of the telephone line) remains arnbiguous.

Diana, the Reverend and Mitchell Quist are al1 possibilities lefi open to the reader.

Narrative Structure and Theory:

The "progression by digression" or tripartite narrative structure was chosen over a conventional Iinear narrative for several reasons. The first is because, in a traditional positivist histoncal narrative, the "ending" as Jeffery suggests in Chapter One, is already known. Since two of the protagonists are historians and much of the novel's discussions centre on the role of historiography, it makes a certain amount of sense given the identity of the first-person narrator.

The shifts among the three time Eames are designed to heighten narrative tension.

Since so much of the plot depends upon the histories of the characters, these need to be revealed incrementally. Particularly, Jeffery's relationship with the Reverend is important fiom a rnythic standpoint, so that the touch of fire's cause can be held in abeyance until the proper dramatic moment. Other novelists (André Alexis, Kurt Vonnegut, A.S. Byatt et, al.) have used this technique and, indeed, it seerns iike the preferred contemporary narrative form. It also allows for a certain amount of hyper or intertextuality; with past tense narratives juxtaposed against present tense narratives, the reader is able to draw cornparisons and connections easily.

Finally, there is Alline. His belief that the redeemed of the Lord "experience al1 times simultaneously" informs the narrative trajectory. As Jeffery's narrative strands gather at the novel's redemptive close, the very structure of the narrative suggests that, in writing his personal history, he has experienced Alline's New Birth, though without, perhaps, re- converting to Christianity.

It is this conversion aspect that informs the use of a first-person narrator. The story is really about Jeffery's transformation fiom a Judas figure (or a single elernent) to a character transformed by "Love" (in Empedoclean ternis, but also in Judeo-Christian and Windu tems) into a '%vhole" person. While it is sometimes dificult fiom an authorial standpoint to maintain the integrity of such a move (afier all, Jeffery is writing some months after the fact and has presumably been partly shaped by the experience) it does serve to problematise

questions of the self and of history which are characteristic of historïographic metafiction.

Jeffery's self-reflexivity and irony as well as his integration of Alline's matenal places him

squarely in the postrnodem tradition from the outset despite, ironically, his disavowal of

postmodemity.

Empedocles and Myth:

While the four element system offers a convenient ftamework for character

description and imagery, its use is also integral to the thematic and narrative engine of the

novel. Jeffery represents fire, Mitchell Quist is water, Diana is earth and Claudia (Cloud-ia)

is air. The imagery associated with each character corresponds accordingly. However, ifs

also worth noting that, for the Greeks, fire and water were warring elements as were earth

and air. The pairing of housemates according to their opposing elements introduces conflict

at the syrnbolic level.

However, it is the world-story told by Empedocles that animates the eIemenbl

model. In the extant fragments of his work, Empedocles elaborates on Thaies' system of the

four roots of reality. He suggests that the four elements are constantly coming together as one and then dissolving again into disunity and chaos, Empedocles suggests that the power of Love unites the cosmos as Strife attempts to destroy union. The ebb and flow of power

between the opposing forces creates history, and '"te present world is the battleground of the struggle that is taking place, a struggle in which he [Strife] is sure to win, but just as sure, thereafter, to be forced to yield his swayy' (Millerd, 29).

At the character level, the LoveIStrife dichotomy operates to create balance or imbalance of the self. Jeffery, for example, is tom apart by betrayal but knitted together by writing his mernoir. Claudia is destabilized by her need to control and extend ownership, but finds healing in the freedom of flight. These interna1 conflicts help to Ccround"characters, who could easily slip into "earth mother" or "demonic" archetypes. For example: Diana may be a nurhinng character, but that concern is corrupted by jealousy when she agrees to spy on

Claudia. Other factors (such as the characters' academic pursuits and persona1 histories) also militate against a simplistic relationship with their corresponding element. The periods of unity and tension between the characters are also marked by StrifeKove. Empedocles' ontology is thus deployed as a series of Chinese boxes at the macro and micro levels (see

Appendix).

The use of the word "myth" to describe Jeffery's peculiar worldview is unavoidably problematic. While his story includes mythic references, (echoes of the Obyssey, the

Orpheus myth, the Bhaguvad~tiTetc.),I balked at describing his worldview as a "personal myth." On the other hand, if the word "myth" is interpreted loosely and taken to mean a principle which organizes one's reality, while at the same tirne is allowed to slip somewhat into its other meanings from time to time, it is appropriate. Alternatives that were considered

("gift" "sight" or c%vorldview")seemed incomplete andlor arid.

Alline and IIistory:

While it appears fiom Jeffery's research in A Touch of Fire that Henry Alline is a marginal or neglected figure in Canadian historiography, the reverse is true. Alline's journal

(the Chipman transcription) and a collection of his sermons have both been published

(although his original journal indeed remains lost). The late George Rawlyk of Queen's

University did extensive research on Alline and suggested that his Great Awakening in Nova

Scotia was an important reason why the American Revolution did not spread to the Canadian east coast This supports Mitchell Quist's belief that individual actions are potentially world- changing. In short, ail references to Alline and his work (with the exception of the comment attributed to the fictitious Methodist Ramsey Buwash) are based on the very best scholarly evidence available. Integrating Alline's ministry and biography with the narrative proved

Iess dificult than anticipated.

What proved diEcult was the decision to set the novei in 199 1-92. It wwas challenging to consider how much has changed in a mere seven years. Political and technological climates change with such rapidity that "rerriembering" 1992 actually required some microfilm research in newspapers. Mitchell Quist's assertion that the early 1990's represents the last days of the "old age" certainly felt Iike an accurate statement as 1 began to consider the novel's location in time.

The Campus Novel:

The campus novel is often seen as a sub-genre of the Bildungmrnan or even a sub- genre of the Erziehungsrornan, itself a sub-genre of the BiZdungroman. Some see it as a minor genre in its own nght, especially given the fact that a multitude of excellent examples of the form can be found, rnany of them Bt-itish in origin. Authors like Kingsley Amis, A.S.

Byatt, Thomas Hardy and Dorothy Sayers, to name a few, have al1 written about the

"Oxbridge" experience. Mile there may be many reasons for situating a novel on a university campus (the varied and often eccentric characters, the conveniently confined setting, the fish-in-a-barre1 opportunity for satire) I believe that the popularity of the form in

British literature is intimately tied up with issues of class and power.

Janice Rossen, in The University in Modern Fiction: When Power is Acadernic, explores the varying degrees in which the university exercises, creates and is subject to power. In Britain, where class structures have traditionally been more rigidly defined than in

North America, the power of the university to exclude the lower classes has, she says, been a popular theme, especially for the "Angry Young Men" of the 1950's-- authors such as

Kingsley Amis, John Wain and John Osborne. In North America, where class mobility is held as a virtue, there has been less resistance to the working classes entering the academy, though obviously this does not mean that the university is fuliy democratized. While the prestige-creating and status-reinforcing characteristics traditionally associated with Oxbridge have no parailel in Canada, the university remains an important comdor to economic and political power in this country that is more open to some than others.

In A Touch of Fire, each of the characters attempts to harness the power of the university for persona1 ends. For Jeffery, the university represents escape from small-town life and a refiige fiom the demands of adulthood, as well as a place to do scholarly work.

Claudia sees La Salle as a rung on the corporate Iadder. Conversely, Mitchell Quist uses it as a place to erase his class position. Diana DUM, (in a self-reflexive authorial gesture) deconstnrcts the politics of the university fiom the inside. While there is an admission that

La Salle (modeled on Queen's University, among others) is not Yale or Cambridge, it is still self-important in a provincial way.

As Rossen points out, much of the university's power is intemal. "The university community can reward or chastise its own members, though it can usually only do this in terms of confemng or withholding academic distinctions.., At the same time this can lead to positions in which power is wielded by those who can judge their colleagues' work" (Rossen,

3). Hence, in the campus novel, the question of hnding, grants and scholarly achievement looms large. In AS. Byatt's Possession, for example, what partly motivates the characters is the desire for academic distinction and reward. While the university operates under an economy of scale, it is one which is of critical importance to the mernbers of the community.

In A Touch of Fie,Jeffery's inability to sustain the "game" he plays with Blijver drives the novel toward its conclusion at the airport. However, Jeffery's cynical manipulation of the system and his critiques of "theory" and ccpolitics"should not be taken to suggest that there is no integrity to the pursuit of scholarship within the university.

While the pursuit of knowledge and the sometimes divying heights of theory and abstraction it entails has led to the pejorative characterimion of the university as the "Ivory

Towel' (evinced in A Touch of Fire by the ruefil reactions of Morgan and other members of the town of La Salle toward the university), La Salle University is somewhat deserving of the label. While the typical Canadian university of the 1990's has attempted to soften its

"publish or perish" focus to concentrate instead on innovative pedagogical techniques and has moved (or been moved) into more complex negotiations with the private sector and a renewed sense of responsibility to the public good, La Salle is an anachronisrn. La Salle

(and especially the history department) is emblematic of a somewhat paradigrnatically hidebound institution, resistant to new modes of scholarship and pedagogy, both out of blind loyalty to tradition and, 1 think, because of a genuine love of traditional scholarship. It is this

"unchanging" character of the institution that is its atîraction for Jeffery. Part of Mitchell

Quist's mission involves convincing Jeffery to apply his historical gifis-- to "carry a thousand-watt Iight down Queen Street," (to put it in typically triurnphalistic Quistian terms), and address both the town's resentment and the university's complacence.

Nevertheless, the difficulty in writing a campus novel fiom the perspective of the student is that the pursuit of scholarly activity (and even, to a certain extent, departmental politics) is ofien not as important to the snident as campus culture writ large. In fact, much ofA Touch of Fire takes place in the off-campus pub, the Sole Café, and there are no scenes which take place within a seminar room, for example. Many campus novels written from the perspective of faculty stress the cut-and-thrust of academic politics, the power relationships and competitiveness between professors and so on. Graduate students, while perhaps nearer to the rhetorical gunfire of their departments than undergraduates, nevertheless have little control over the defining batties. Removed fkom agency over the pedagogical or political orientation of the school, graduate students operate their own rivakies and political structures. Students are unable to withhold fùnding or evaluate each other, so their relationships outside the cIassroom are surprisingly complex and interesting from a dramatic standpoint. For example: while scholarly abilities are important to student identity, the liaisons among students in a pub are not mediated through a classroom authority figure but dictated by a variety of non-academic social factors.

The question of power within gender relationships is one which campus fiction typically explores. Rossen identifies two tendencies within the British university novel: novels whose "heroines who take the honor of university admission very much in stride and who settre into university Iife with ease" and novels which deal headlong with the "prejudice against women learning" (Rossen, 32). The problem with situating A Tauch of Fire in 1992, in the shadow of the Montreal Massacre and in the midst of a right-wing media campaign against the forces of "po1itica1 correctness" is only compounded by the fact that the narrator is a raîher myopic white male operating within a conservative university constituency.

Jeffery's responçe to the crucifixion of a woman on the Plaxton Hall clock tower, for instance, does not substantially engage the issue of violence against women. On the other hand, he recognizes that Diana is easily his intellectual equal if not a more gifted intellect altogether. While he notes the near-absence of women in the history department faculty, he does not seem overly troubled by it. While Diana (in a later conversation in which she reveals her mother's history to Jeffery) passionately describes her fnistration with the complicated position of women in the early 1990's campus, Jeffery does not initially empathize with her. This is one of the diEculties in writing a mediated narrative in which the political sensibilities of the narrator do not match one's own.

Diana and Claudia's dialogue gives clues to the compiicated power stnrggle within the Canadian university campus in the early 1990's. On the one hand, Diana consistently denies being interested in ccpolitics," yet the title of her thesis is The University Campus in

Fiction: Power, Politics and Identity Formation and it is infomed by readings of feminist theorists like Spivak. She daims that she doesn't want '30 read books out of a sense of duty to ...p olitics," but has playfülly named her cats Gloria and Naomi and has a persona1 library fil1 of feminist criticism. Similarly, Claudia poses as the femme fatale, but her imrnediate reaction to Jeffery is pugilistic; a blur of words and a defensive body posture when she accepts a ride from him. Diana and Claudia engage Jeffery with unflattering descriptions of each other, (predator, beatnik) but they are also friends who go out dancing together, part of the elaborate dynamic between them. Jeffery rnay only be dimly aware of it, but there are cornplex power negotiations going on which certainly affect the ways in which the women in the novel interact with him. Only as the novel concludes does he begin to understand sorne of the patterns he has seen.

A similar set of gender negotiations operates in the flashbacks to Aftercliffe, where women are silenced (Mrs. MacArthur) objectified (Randa Keller) and beaten (Riopelle's girlfiend). Again, Jeffery's initial inability ta deal with these negotiations analytically

highlights his flaws as a narrator and the overall mediated quality of the narrative.

Names and Geography:

Throughout the novel, the only character to use Jeffery's name properly is Diana.

Mitchell Quist is overly familiar (Jeffie, buddy), the faculty are overly formal (Mr.

MacArthur, MacArthur) and everyone else seems to have his or her pet-name for him

(General, Red, Shaggy). Since the question of identity and the hgrnented self is so integral

to the novel (and indeed, to most campus novels) it seemed reasonable to make Jeffery's

identity a matter of contention among the other characters (and to himself as weil). Diana's

correct use of his narne suggests that she has a specia1 insight into his character that not even

Mitchell Quist has, since she is, afier all, the CO-agentof his "redemption."

MitcheIl Quist's narne is a deliberate assonance, close enough to ccJesusChristy' for

the reader to rnisread cc.ïesus,Quist" as the proper name of the Son of God rather than as an expletive. No one refers to him by name in any piece of dialogue, however, and in the body of the text both his first and 1st names are used.

Diana Dunn's name corresponds to the Demeter-ish nature of her corresponding elernent. Claudia's name is simiIarIy evocative, but, since it can be read as either "Clod-ia" or c'Cloud-ia," it suggests both ethereal and worldly characteristics.

Jeffery's use of"the Reverend" and Morgan's use of "Good Doctor" are deliberate parallels. The use of the honorific suggests emotional distance and disdain for the Vocation of the Father. Jeffery is named after his mother's farnily, but his mother is nearly absent in the narrative except for her name. This is similarly true of Claudia, Morgan and Mitchell

Quist's mothers. The most accessible materna1 figure in the narrative is Diana's who, ironically, is behind bars. AI1 the rnothers in the novel have been absented or erased by patnarchal power structures and exist only as names. There is a disturbing materna1 silence in A Touch of Fire made al1 the more disturbing by the narrator's inability to locate the gap.

The "Weed Man," "Fencepost" and "Crazy Bob" appellations seem playfiil, but are actually evidence of the distance between Jeffery and the other characters in his narrative.

Later in the novel we discover the last name of Clarence the bartender in relation to a police investigation, and JefTery muses about the Foucaldian or regulatory function of naming.

Place names come fiom a variety of focations and were amved at with playful deliberation. "La Salle" is a district in Kingston. The "Sole Café" is based on the "Only

CafSyin Peterborough. The "Brass Taps" is the "official" name of Guelph's "Keg," but its interior and reputation are that of Kingston's notorious "Royal Tap Room." The "Seagram's

Rowing Regatta" recalls St. Catharines' "Henley Regatta." Geography is also tinkered with.

La Salle exists where Kingston should be, except that a river nins through it (like the

Ottonabee in Peterborough) and the area, (through a slight tweak of Canadian history) retains

French characteristics. The intent was to use a pastiche of names and geographical markers to create a town that was both like Kingston and different enough to pose as a generic

OntarioIQuébec university town in order to appeal to a variety of readerly experiences of

Canadian campus culture. The result is a fictive, hybrid tomwhich, because it explores real locations in combination, also has a consistent identity unIike that of any actual university town. However, the "play" aspect of naming and geography is significant, too.

Just as the text should elicit joy and pleasure to sustain the reader's interest, it is similarly important that the text be tùn to produce if the author's interest is to be sustained over the time it takes to produce a text. Afterciiffe is a similar composite. While there is a town called ccAtterciiffe"in the

Niagara area near Dunnville, the latter is my hometown and actually serves as the mode1 for

AfierclifFe, though 1 suppose that Selkirk, Smithville, Fenwick and a dozen more

cornmunities in the area are a11 similar, if not downright identical. The name ccAftercIiffe"

suggests, 1 think, a mood in keeping with the economically depressed and isolated nature of

fm-service Niagara communities in the 1980's. It is this particular cultural moment (since

faded with the ubiquity of cable television, internet access and the incursion of franchise

restaurants and stores into the region) that I both wished to explore and eulogize.

Stakes, Conclusions and a Disclaimer:

The cornmitment required to complete a text of this length unavoidably requires one to examine one's personal stakes in such a project. The question of the author's place within the text is not something which is ezsily explained "merely" in terms of one's intellectual attachment to it or by the joy of producing text for others' enjoyrnent (though both are surely important). But the novel's heart and viscera are, inescapably, also the author's.

One's university years are an important liminal phase. The student lives suspended between the parental home and the worker's home, between history and tùture. It is a time in which one's possibilities seem endless and yet the choices one makes every day serve to

Iimit those possibilities. Perhaps this is no different in type than any of life's many stages, but the degree to which people experience hope (or futility) whiIe in university seems to me to be significantly heightened by passions and energies that are Young, rough and raw.

On page 62, Jeffery describes another author in the Sole-- a tired man with fingers twisted in his hair. This other author occupies the place of Diana (the critic of the university, a redemptive agent), writing his thoughts down into a black sketch book. Later in the text, as hffery's writing begins to move him along the path to his own redemption (the point at which his own potential impact on the world around him is realized) the writer escapes the touch of fire and strengthens with each step he takes toward the river.

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Jeffery Fire - Strife = Betrayal Alline father MacArthur - Love = Memoir (Activist ) G@: Visions. Able to "see" history. WorM Mythic

Mitchell Water - Ssife = GreedPower Gifa Father Quist - Love = Discourse (Class) Gfl: Prophetic. AbIe to "changey' the füture. World Discursive

Diana Earth - Strife = Jealousy Ulysses Mother Dunn - Love = Authenticity (Activist) GfiActivism. Uses theory to "heal." Worid Natural

Claudia Air - Strife = Control Wealth of Nations Mother Lefebvre - Love = Freedom (Ciass) Gfl: Ethereal. Able to exist c'outside'~the temporal. World: Corporate

Opposites: Air/Earth Corporate/Activist WaterFire Terrorist/MiddIeClass (Corporate)

Associated: AirNater Middle Class/Corporate EarthiFire Terrorist/Activist

Minor CharacterIMajor Character Paralleb: (Selected) Minor Character Parallels:

Morgan / Mitchell Quist Mayor Hagan / Mrs. Lefebvre / Mr. Quist Weed Man / Diana Dunn Mrs. MacArthur / Mrs- DUM / Mr. Lefebvre Randa KeIler / Claudia Alline / Ajuna Crazy Bob / Jeffery Reverend / Mrs. Dm