Midnite Moving Co

Jesse, despite his upbringing, was a man who found ways to be happy. From his earliest days, he’d learned to take pleasure in very small things; when Very Large Things swam into view, indistinct in outline and promising wonders, he would often turn his back on them, so to speak, and focus his attention on something very small.  It was while tangled in this habit that Jesse turned away from George, who was manifold in his dangerous fascinations, and back to an intense, but sadly mockable, personal situation.

There was to his knowledge no one in Vancouver he could speak to on the subject. He either felt fear or humiliation at the thought of speaking to Rhonda or Raven or perhaps George about it. He tried to imagine George’s response, and thought there was a good chance he’d say something snarky, if he said anything at all.  George liked to joke, but not to be the butt of one.

Jesse had a startling, sweet tenor, but no one ever heard it; Penny the Momster had seen to that. He walked into Robert Burnaby Park until he could hear nothing but the hum of the highway, and believed he could not be heard, and sang,

There’s a moment in a city morning

When everything is soft and still

Far off you can hear a dog bark

Farther off a car alarm trill

And the overcast has cleared

And the stars seem near

As childhood recollection.

Now I am old and the stars are far away

And yet I feel the same connection

He broke off. He couldn’t sing the chorus without crying, not right now.  He didn’t feel grateful. He was too angry at his situation, and too confused.

It was an hour before dawn on a pleasant day in September.  He was flush, he didn’t feel lonely, he was (after a scolding by one of his poly partners) staying fairly sober most days, and he certainly felt sober to his core today.

He found a good sized tree and sat at its base, ignoring the dew.

He was facing into the sun. He was watching the sun come up. He was watching the purple and gold quietly take dominion of the sky. He was looking directly into the sun.

He jerked awake. He was supposed to be meditating in nature for twenty minutes, not falling asleep like a noob.

“It’s no big thing,” Jesse said, standing and brushing himself off. He’d looked at his phone for a time check and realized he’d slept through his meditation time and now had to motor on home.

Home was a basement in a house owned by one of his former teachers, already blacked out and soundproofed as it had been used as a dungeon. (His landlord had removed the fasteners and chains, apparently). The layout sucked, but the ceilings were pushing three metres high, and he had tired of looking at apartments that looked like the ‘before’ picture in a hoarding documentary, if a basement apartment in East Burnaby was all he could afford.

He spoke his problem aloud.

”Somebody wants to treat me like a god. Somebody,” and here he took a breath, “wants to believe I’m the avatar of a god.” Absorbed by the vegetation, the breeze, the ground, the words vanished.

He wondered if he’d been singing in his sleep.  That would have been rather eerie for anyone listening, he imagined, and started to laugh.

A small liver and white dog snuffled up to him. She was a beautiful silky creature, a springer spaniel cross, with a pointed and inquisitive nose.  Presently the owner, a Chinese man in his fifties, appeared in the gloom, smiling apologetically and putting the leash back on her collar. Jesse smiled back and swiftly walked home, where he had an unpleasant encounter with his landlord’s wife.

“Why did you go out so early?” she asked, ambushing him by his side entrance door.

“The rental laws of BC don’t say anything about me being required to talk to you about my personal life,” Jesse said with a very broad smile. It felt very good to assert himself with this woman, who did not seem to have her own life to keep her busy.  Jesse knew he was not going to be living there long; moving out in the middle of the night would hardly be a problem. He felt sad for his former teacher, but he’d married this woman, and thus was likely used to disappointment.

“I want to know what you’re doing to my property value,” she said. The volume went up. She closed in on him. She smelled like bad perfume and dirty hair, and if she’d ever heard of interpersonal space, she didn’t know how to use it.

“It’s half an hour before dawn and you’re standing outside yelling at a tenant,” Jesse said calmly and quietly, mentally adding, “Who is a god, I’ll have you know.” “What do you think you’re doing to your property value?” He got the door open to the sound of her hissing, “Don’t you walk away when I’m talking to you!”, smiled at her again and, still smiling, closed the screen door in her face.

Once he had the light on, the smile vanished. It was obvious. She’d been in the apartment. His laptop had been moved. He felt the crawling disgust of having his space occupied and his belongings handled by her.

He texted George, “Gotta move out. Landlady’s a creeper.”

George was up already. “Prunes,” he texted back. 

It was part of their growing working slang.  It was an acknowledgement that Jesse needed to move shit along, but there was a fix for it at least; the ‘happy outcome’ promised by a handful of fruit.

It was as if George was drawing attention to his weirdness with his monosyllabic response. George never seemed to need the toilet; never seemed to sweat, although sometimes he had a slight sheen to him, as if someone had wiped him down with Ginseng Miracle Oil, and he had never eaten, at least in front of Jesse.  He spent a lot of time thinking about how, if George ever relaxed enough to let him into his reportedly spartan little flat in Gastown, he was going straight to the fridge, if only to check what kind of mustard he used.

Jesse stripped, placing his clothes on a valet he’d either boosted or rescued during a client move, depending on what strict interpretation of either word one decided to take. That move had been so problem free, Jesse had made the mistake of commenting on it.  Ten minutes later, the client’s special pal had pulled a gun on him (again? again??), and George had pulled it out of his hand as if it was a Nerf Gun and dude was a naughty child.

“You didn’t even look concerned,” Jesse said afterward.

“I don’t think he could hurt me,” George said. “He was aiming at you, and I’d be pissed if he shot you.”

“Gee thanks,” Jesse said, although he was grateful.

Still thinking about that move, and George’s apparent fearlessness, Jesse slid into bed. He took a handful of pills out of the nightstand. They were mostly useless, and more for psychological effect than any therapeutic result, but he tossed them into his mouth anyway, and washed them down with water.  He put on his sleep visor, carefully put in his earplugs and sighed.

It wasn’t every night he got to play God, and he needed to be well rested.

Jesse woke at noon.  The landlady was at work, thank God, or she’d have been doing something useless and noisy and to interfere with his sleep.  The requirement for sleep during the day had been made so clear to the landlord, and it was so opaque to the unfortunate person who was his wife. The landlord was unfortunate too, but he at least was a decent human being, so the bad luck didn’t run all the way through.

He made breakfast, coffee and a smoothie and scrambled eggs with cheese, ate it and did the dishes.

Once he’d dealt with the coffee, it was time for his workout.  His extra-special payday had allowed him to buy some upmarket exercise equipment. Two hours later it was time for a shower. There was no air conditioning in the house and although the apartment was usually cool, it now felt like a swamp. He knew his worshipper was going to bathe him again tonight as part of her ritual, and as with everything about the situation, her devotion could be viewed many ways; with amusement, with dread, with sympathy, and most usually with the flat and uncensorious incomprehension which, in the face of a human experience so different from his own, was his resting state.

He spent the rest of the day binge-watching Fringe and eating snacks, healthy and otherwise. He didn’t usually hit the bong until about four, since when he made that mistake it would completely fuck up his day. Today he didn’t bother, since tonight he would likely be impaired and staying over, with his Evil Villain mask at the ready so he could get home.  How the landlady had yelled the first time she’d seen it! It had almost been worth it, although he’d been so wretched from alcohol he felt her voice going through his head like a scrollsaw.

Since her first tentative suggestion a few months earlier, he’d had lots of time to think. He got the creepy feeling that if he were a god, he might possibly be Attis or one of them other godly dudes and maybe going to get sacrificed, but Lark (whom his sister, not knowing how unconventional their relationship was, referred to as ‘Larp’, while smirking that Jesse was probably calling her that now too, at least mentally) had assured him that human sacrifice was never acceptable to her gods without being freely given for the welfare of the group in the context of a community-threatening conflict. Or so he hazily recollected, he’d been plenty high at the time. He did remember the part about ‘enthusiastic consent’ and relaxed, but not much.  He was trying so hard to be a good sport about it, and clearly remembered saying something like, “So you won’t sacrifice me to make sure Stephen Harper gets kicked out in the next election,” which had made her face go red.

Doubt swayed and pivoted in his chest. She was going to ask him to drink honeyed wine, which sounded barfulous.

The sun was low in the sky when the taxi came. Transit would have been cheaper, but he was tired of the stares, and finding nastily captioned pictures of himself on the internet, worse now that somebody had been able to figure out what his name was. He’d lost count of how many of the Skytrain Stasi had confronted him; one had tried to hit him up with pepper spray, and another one had tried to rip off the mask, which given it was dawn on a brilliant day, might have killed him.  Repeated nasty letters, including one pro bono from the BCCLA to Translink, hadn’t helped.

He tried to picture what was going to happen next, and failed. He felt as horny as a floor mat.  The driver nearly drove off, but Jesse held up the cash for the fare and walked around to the driver’s side, where he showed his ID and said, “I explained this to the dispatcher!  Sir, can you please call them?” He stifled the urge to hop around yelling that he’d report him if he drove off. After a long, unblinking moment, the driver put up his left hand and said, without enthusiasm, “Okay, get in.”

Jesse got in.  He put his head back, closed his eyes, and told the driver to turn up the bhangra full blast as a concession to the fright he’d inadvertently given him. The driver complied, and they travelled without conversation for most of the twenty-five minute ride. The driver knocked Jesse out of his doze to take evasive maneuvers when an SUV pulled out of a parking space on Commercial. Whatever he said, Jesse assumed in Punjabi, sounded quite pungent.

“You can let me off here,” Jesse said, and tipped him five dollars. Word would get around that the crazy guy in the goggles was a trouble-free customer and good tipper.

He texted Lark upon his arrival and then, as he looked down the side street, acknowledged the waning gibbous moon that had just risen in the east. It seemed foolish and somehow appropriate.

To be an atheist, as he felt he was, and hold the space in himself to acknowledge the pale goddess humans wrote on that slippery circle. To say goddess meant so much more than that. 

You are the polarized light that guides earth’s animals to mate, to hunt, to cycle in time.

                                      You are the calendar that brought us time and thus put science more firmly in our grasp.

                                                                           You are the far horizon of thought and the concept of distance and relationship to the sun.

You are the undiscovered country we can see and not touch.

You come by the cell window and through the palace door.

And I could give you names, my lady Moon, for all of time and in all the human languages, and still I would not have given you your due, for all you’ve meant to humankind, and how very inadequate and strange it is that I would even gender you.

That is how I experience you.

He recognized in himself a desire to please Lark, in how he was stopping to make space and get closer to her mindset. Even though she was crazy.  He didn’t like thinking the word, but the word demanded to be thought. He thought: The trick was not speaking it.  Yeah, that was the real trick. Crazy infests English like an earworm or a badly-remembered dream.

So many triggers were waiting for him in that room, her shrine / playroom, triggers forever associated with her building’s stairwells, and attached with neural glue to those strangely malodorous elevators, even though the building was less than two years old.

As he stood looking at the moon, a white guy about his age, with a laughing buddy trailing after him, walked up and said all snotty, “Fuck you looking at, asshole?”

I’m worshipping a goddess and you’re pissing in my ear. Okay —technically I was worrying about my PTSD, but I don’t think she’d mind.

He could think it; he felt no wish to say it.  Keeping his mouth shut was a habit, and George probably liked him that way; he certainly shut down questions with a smooth combination of misdirection, honest answers you didn’t want to hear, and still-bleeding hunks of snark.

He quickly walked away from the two men, wishing he had George’s confidence.  If George was here, he’d trip those fuckers and hog-tie them, but now ’tis time to deke into an alley and gain access to Lark’s building with the side door key.

As he slowly climbed the stairs, he tried to calm down by telling himself a funny story.

Lark had been appalled when it was learned the smelly elevators had been recycled from a bankrupt condo building. While Jesse was trying to figure out how they got the elevators out without destroying the building, Lark sounded off.  Her narrow face, with its mask-like wrinkles, seemed to pounce on her own words, something she only did when she was pontificating. How could, she had said, chewing on the words like a diva, such a direly incompetent thing as a bankrupt condo building happen in the Unreal City that is the Vancouver housing market? It seems beyond reason!

After that Jesse spun himself a tale about how the elevators got so smelly – well he did sometimes, you know, spin a tale to explain the elevators being smelly, or he’d tell himself a story that his dad was going to get him out of that goddamned house, or think his mother might just drop dead from being so sour and so sere, and god, she was like an emotional desiccant sitting in your face and climbing down your fucking lungs all the time, but really this tale he spun was a bit much, because he talked himself into believing there’d been not one but two mob hits in both elevators and there were little pieces of corpse tucked into various unseen crevices, slowly rotting and mouldering. 

Then you ass, he thought with mocking self-admonishment, you complete and total ass, Lark tells you that one of the other strata owners had illegally but effectively put up webcams, and soon viewed with horror that yet a third strata owner was releasing the contents of what was soon identified as a modified marijuana vapour bag into the elevator, although the contents did not appear to be pot. Jesse had six kinds of pot at home, and was confident he could distinguish whatever this smell was from any skunkweed on the market.

Oh no! said the unified voice of the strata council during a secret meeting that would have made a copy of Robert’s Rules of Order, had one been in the room, self-animate and flap out the door.  But wasn’t it possible, dreadful thought, that a noxious and potentially harmful gas had been released in a confined space? And while our feckless band of parsimonious asshats debated this, losing track for the duration of the whole ‘elevators-have-doors’ concept, no-one thought to check the footage if the man was still using the elevator, which would argue against it being worse than an annoyance.

Lark noted that the council found out later that he did, so whatever-it-was could hardly be toxic. The strata council, easily one of the weirdest and least effective she’d ever heard of, could have stopped the insanity right there. But no. It would be too easy to tell him they knew what was going on and ask him politely to stop.  

Lark made a siren noise.

So the cops got involved, and Lark considered this in poor taste. Jesse’s opinion was somewhat stronger.

Jesse, being big, muscular and ethnically opaque due to the mask, at least in daylight hours (although he’d not likely be mistaken for an Inuit man) had likely drawn more police attention since he’d lived in Vancouver than the equally white Lark had met with in her whole life, with her kids’ lives thrown in for laughs. Jesse had seen cops do right and had seen them do wrong, but good behaviour and clear speech or unnecessary roughness and profanity all made no difference in the end. It had always been in a situation when they were armed and he was not.

Cops were always creeped out by how his mask had to cover his mouth too, so he was swaddled like the Invisible Man.  His tongue and lips got welts just like everything else, and had to be protected. There’d been some talk of custom-making something just for his mouth that would signal he had a mouth, but the mockup made Jesse look ludicrous and the price was like the whistle of Viking broadswords. After discussion and out of necessity, the biomedical tech folks modified a custom order bondage hood by putting specially tinted and coated lenses in it. He’d really not wanted to order a beige mask, but he knew a brighter colour would pull in the Five-O like a burning cop car.  Black would make him look like a gimp escaped from a dungeon.

He was at the top of the stairs.  He had to use another key to gain access to the top floor apartments. He paused for a minute, telling himself the end of the story was worth it.

So a couple of days later two cops, both white, one apparently a woman, knocked on his door — the poor guy lived just down the hall from Lark — and while the down-the-hall neighbour was letting the cops in, her across-the-hall neighbour opened her door a crack and when the far door closed, took a drinking glass down the hall and put it on the door to eavesdrop, like something out of Fifties TV.

With embarrassment verging on terror, the ‘accused’ admitted to the police to having invented a device which captures all of his flatus so that he can squeeze it all out of the bag into the elevator, for that is how people will get to know him.  The cops, giving evidence they were some form of superhuman, maybe supernatural beings, did not laugh, but the across-the-hall neighbour did. She dropped the glass, which miraculously didn’t break, and scurried back to her apartment before one of the cops, hearing the commotion, whipped the door open.

Lark of course heard this breathlessly recounted the next morning over coffee with the neighbour.

The cops, with more respect for their duty to the public than one often credits them for, promptly left, and no further action was taken, except that everybody now wanted the Man who Bags his Farts out of the building except Lark, who said given a choice between living in the same building as an international banker and a guy with poor communication skills and a weird fetish, she’d take the farts every time.

Well, and why not.

Lark was waiting for him and likely starting to worry, since he’d already texted her.

He unlocked and pulled open the stairwell door.

For a moment he stood outside her door, but she’d heard the outer doorway make a scraping noise as it closed, and she welcomed him in.

He immediately took off his mask and shook out his hair, sighing with relief.

“I welcome you as an avatar of Cernunnos. Come share a Mabon feast,” Lark said.

“I could eat,” Jesse said.

Lark froze.

Sensing a more formal response was required, he took both of her hands in his, looked directly into her eyes and said, trying to sound less stilted aloud than it felt in his head, “I thank and bless you for all your good gifts.”

Lark beamed, and led him by the hand to her kitchen table, where platters of food and carafes of wine and jugs of beer awaited him.

“Bless this household,” Jesse said. “This is a meal fit for a god.” He tried not to sound like Thor from the movies.

She said a short and heartfelt blessing over the food, and, after washing their hands in a silver bowl, they ate, while Celtic harp music played softly in the background. The food was a genuine treat for Jesse, who did not get home-cooked meals that often. Raven wasn’t domestic and he was indifferent to the study of cookery.

Lark was sparing in her alcohol consumption and did not consume illegal drugs, but wild gods do as they please.  After their meal, Jesse excused himself to stand on the balcony and gazed at the North Shore Mountains, where the lights from the ski runs and the moonlight pushed them against the darkened sky. While he admired he view, he vaped the Comatose he’d brought, until he nearly was.

Bleary-eyed, he slid the balcony door open.

She had used the time to clear the table, and had changed from a plain white gown into a short, fine linen robe of forest green.

“Cernunnos, Lord of all that lives in the woods, will you honour me and join me in our shrine?”

“I will,” Jesse said. Instead of being creepy, and everything he dreaded, it was all very sweet and loving and hospitable, and he felt his anxiety and uncertainty finally melt away.

Lark gently and carefully removed his clothing, and slid out of her robe. She wordlessly directed him to lie face down on a massage table. Jesse wagered with himself that whatever oil she applied was going to smell atrocious, but apart from frankincense, which he recognized because his sister had always had a weird thing for it, he couldn’t recollect what anything else in the oil might be. It was a wild and evocative scent. He smiled and said, into his forearms, “Thank you.”

The massage pulled every vestige of pain and emotional discomfort from his body. After a long, contented, extended moment, which might have been an hour, Jesse stopped feeling the endorphin rush, and something else rushed into him instead.

“Can you feel that?” Lark said, lifting her hands from the backs of his thighs, startled out of her ritual. It’s one thing to invoke a god. It’s another to have him appear.

“Oh, yes,” said Jesse said, rolling onto his side. Forty-five minutes later, exhausted, triumphant and slightly perplexed, they looked into each other’s eyes and laughed.

The giggles and cuddling lasted a while. Lark arose and danced at one point, wearing only a belt covered in tiny tinkling bells which filled the room with a shimmering noise, and then she retook her place next to him, in her finely woven sheets, and he made a little groan of contentment as she slowly placed her head on his shoulder.

Then, as if his emotions had been loosened with his tendons, Jesse wept. He later told Raven it was like being a hailstone, driven up and down by natural forces, until finally he was too heavy to be buffeted any longer. He felt himself start, as if he literally had been thrown down onto the bed; sleep enfolded him.

He awoke to candlelight.

Lark was sitting next to the bed, sketching him. She wore a satin bathrobe, sky blue above the waist and grey and brown below, embroidered with designs like the mithril tracery of trees from the door of Moria. She looked roseate and relaxed, paint removed, although, smiling to himself, he saw one little speck of it on her cheek. She was a thin woman, but Jesse thought she seemed plumper somehow. He had a brief, somewhat pornographic flash as to why that might be.

“What time is it?” Jesse said indistinctly. 

“Four a.m., or thereabouts.” She frowned.

“What’s wrong?” Jesse said, sitting up.

Her expression cleared, and she looked at him with a gaze full of the love that doesn’t know how to possess, existing in the constant flow of offering and acceptance.

He smiled back.

“There’s nothing wrong,” she said. “But I have a few more favours to ask of you, as Jesse, rather than as my god.” Now her voice was teasing.

“More adult fun times?”

“Perhaps,” she said, again with that lilt. She set aside her sketchbook and went to an armoire, which she opened to reveal a horned mask and a bi-coloured robe of what looked like homespun and home-dyed wool.  It looked itchy.  “When you’re fully awake, I would like you to wear these, so I can draw you. And with your permission, take photos. Your face will be behind a mask.” She returned to the chair by the bed.

“Used to that,” Jesse said blankly. Then, realizing he hadn’t answered the implied question, said, “Of course.  It’s not every day a man gets that close to the Summerlands and returns whole.”

“One other favour, one you may not wish to grant.”

Jesse did not brace himself on the outside. He’d learned not to.

“It’s a question.”

“Oh,” Jesse said. “I don’t think I have any secrets from you, now.”

“Mysteries will always remain, and are to be honoured as the boundaries of human life on this world. But I wanted to know, out of simple curiosity, why it was you cried.”

Jesse felt himself tearing up again, and after a deep breath said, “I don’t know if I can give you a good answer to that, but I’ll try.” He pursed his lips, and sniffed, and said, “I told you my mother never loved me.”

“Yes.”

“The only love I got from women or girls was from my aunt and my sister. But knowing that your mother didn’t love you, didn’t put you to her breast, mocked and harassed and worked you like a donkey — you don’t get over that. You don’t grieve for a year and a day and find yourself free and clear.”

“No,” Lark said.

“You gave me peace from that.”

Lark bit her lip. She was nearly crying, but composed herself before the first tear escaped.

“Even if it never happens again,” Jesse said, lying back with a thump, since as tender as her gaze was, he could no longer meet it, “It happened once. Everything good and wild and loving, everything growing and green and fruitful, came to me from your hands.”

He sat up suddenly.

“Did I tell you I prayed to the moon before I came in?”

“Hell of a thing for an atheist to say,” she chided, laughing as tears fell.

“I think it worked,” Jesse said, with an almost childlike satisfaction. “Mind you,” he added, “I didn’t ask for anything.  I just praised her.”

“Well done,” Lark said. She rose and carefully snuffed the candles, returning through the scented darkness to his embrace.

The next move went by in a blur, and the next.  George was obsessively keeping track of pointless details, and Jesse didn’t try to stop him.

For a week after his brief dip in the imaginary ocean of theophany, Jesse had seen representations of Hornèd Gods and Green Men everywhere.

It was faintly outlined on the bicep of the dark brown guy in front of him in the coffee lineup. He shook his head and peered harder, since it was so hard to see, and the guy caught him looking.

Inwardly dying of embarrassment, outwardly smiling and apologetic, Jesse said, “I’m sorry man, didn’t mean to stare.”

Still smiling, the man put his thumb on the switch of a little ultraviolet LED hanging from a buttonhole on his vest. Jesse jumped a little, since it could make him quite sick, but saw the outline. Other figures from Celtic mythology danced down his arm.  This being Vancouver, there was only one possible response.

“Cool!” he said. “I’ve heard of UV tattoos, but I’d never seen one in real life.” They chatted about it while they waited for their orders.

He was crossing Nanaimo on foot (against the light, of course) and a car with a Green Man painted on the driver’s side door went by. He was almost run down by another car when he halted in the street to look at it.

George pointed one out to him, after Jesse had mentioned he was seeing them non-stop. It was Mod Podge®d on the side of a mini-library a few doors down from a job they did in Kerrisdale.

A Cernunnos wooden mask with goat eyes looked down on him from a balcony on Broadway, most of its paint destroyed by the weather; another deer antler peeped out from behind a bra-strap, with Kwan Yin’s hand (or so he presumed) appearing with a lotus on the other side.

He opened a copy of the Georgia Straight. The band of the week was a posed in front of a poster of Cernunnos.

“Aaaagh!” Jesse said, at that. He phoned Lark and told her about it.

“Frequency effect and clustering illusion,” she said.

“We had a close encounter with a god, for god’s sake, and you’re telling me  about my cognitive biases?” he said in disgust.

“Do you think that’s what happened?” Lark said, sounding genuinely amused. “Our gods are present all the time, just like our cares and our blood and our biases. We made an effort to see him, that’s all.  The effort isn’t always rewarded, but you can’t stay in the liminal state.  There’s always dirty socks and cat poop.” She made a thoughtful noise in her throat. “You’re going to see Cernunnos here and there for the rest of your life. He is life and green-ness, renewal, the springing, sudden force of masculinity, the sheltering tree for the other critters. Pay attention when you see him.  Choose the light.”

“This is going to sound stupid, but did he leave anything behind?” Jesse said.

Lark chuckled. “This is going to sound like a hackneyed answer, but did he find anything in you that wasn’t there already?”

She had him, since technically the whole thing had been a shared hallucination.

“Not really.”

“Don’t make too much of it.  You’ve had an unsettling experience. Wind blew through parts of you that you thought were wrapped up tight.”

“You seem fine with it.”

“Appearance, belief, credibility, doubt, ecstasy, fear, grounding,” she said, as if she were reading from a book. “You never know what order the experience will come in, but you need to get grounded at the end.”

“Nothing like hauling buckets of other people’s crap around to keep ya grounded,” Jesse said.

“Well there ya go,” she said, mimicking his tone. “I don’t mean to be mean, but perhaps we can take a break for a couple of weeks.”

“Not permanent.”

“Not if I have anything to say about it,” she said, with heartening emphasis.  “But if I tell you I need perhaps a month to let the energies settle….”

“It’s okay,” Jesse said. Being poly meant that conversations like this were way easier not to take personally.

“What happened to you?” George said when Jesse dragged himself into work the night after his encounter with Lark, and that other imaginary guy who’d come along for the ride. 

“None of your business,” Jesse said. He wasn’t going to breathe a word about it to George, the world’s harshest and most uncompromising atheist. (“My people have been atheists for generations.”)

“You’re different.”

“You, in your scorn for etiquette, are exactly the same.”

“That was uncivil.”

“I had a really, really good teacher,” Jesse said. He left it to George to figure out whether he was talking about his own mother – or George.

George sidestepped with ease. He came on very predatory at times, leaning in for the kill during conversations. “I’m serious.  What happened to you?”

“I don’t want to describe it, I can’t explain it, and it has something to do with Lark.”

“But it was good.  I can feel it. Something wonderful, surprising.”

“Excellent guesses, very accurate! – but it’s still none of your business.”

“Perhaps I should meet Lark,” George said thoughtfully.

“I was raised to have no hope of privacy, but there’s no fucking way I’m putting up with that from you,” Jesse said, and George sensibly abandoned the inquisition.