Tag: Midnite Moving Co

“Gotcha,” Jesse said blankly. He returned the truck, took a cab home, and did not sleep.

Jesse, who knew he was not imagining things, wondered if he’d ever see George again.   Apart from former clients, there was nobody else in town who could identify him. He’d never been to George’s apartment.  If George decided to vanish, there’d be nothing to show for it but a couple of anecdotes and a Fortean-scale mystery and whatever money he’d managed to make.  He could try running down the antiquities part of George’s business, or see if anybody in the poly group had more of a line on him.

Getting out in Abbotsford, though. For George to have been that angry and that disgusted, that he didn’t even want to ride back into town with him, was almost scary.

He felt like he’d broken George. It hadn’t seemed possible.  Now it did.

But George, true to what seemed to be his nature, reappeared for the next job, free of comment or insult, and he waited until he had all of Jesse’s attention to apologize.

“I’m very proud,” George said. “I like to think I know everything and when I don’t I can be quite obsessive and angry and …”

“Humiliated,” Jesse said.

George didn’t argue.  “I’m sorry for worrying you and I’m sorry I kept harassing you about your personal life.”

Jesse briefly considered George, and what he’d said. “You couldn’t worry me, at least about your physical health. I was worried that you’d fired me without notice.”

“Very well,” George said, “I’m sorry about that too.”

“I for one am sorry I saw you disappear,” Jesse added.

“You didn’t see that,” George said, and there was a thread of some other mood than dismissal. 

Mmhmm, thought Jesse.

“Oh, I’m not saying there’s not a rational explanation,” Jesse said with a calmness he didn’t feel.  After all, if he was right, there was no telling how George would respond. “Quit squirming, I know you’re not human.”

“Of course I’m human,” George said, in a tone that implied that any other suggestion was ludicrous..

“No, you really aren’t,” Jesse said.  “Ya see, one of the things about my childhood is that my mother gaslighted me about damned near everything, but my aunt and sister prevented me from completely losing my mind, and my keen observation, especially when I’m sensing I might be in danger.”

George gazed at him, motionless.

 Jesse continued. “I have no idea why a puka or magic sasquatch or temporarily embarrassed vampire would want to live in Vancouver —“

Here George tried to interrupt, but Jesse wasn’t having any. “— And whoever you are, you’re certainly welcome here, seeing as how you appear to be performing heroic tasks to make fat stacks.”

George quit trying to interrupt, with a sharply exhaled sigh.

Jesse continued. “I don’t really care what you are. All I care about, and all I’m ever gonna care about, is how you behave.”

“So I could be a vampire or some kind of magical creature and you’d be okay with that,” George said.

“I would be as accepting as I could manage, and as curious as I could get away with. I find it interesting that I had a massive cognitive reset and you could immediately tell, but not what happened. So I know you’re not spying on me.”

George made a noise.

“Anybody who has the power of invisibility can spy on people.  Humans find it almost impossible not to spy if they have the capacity. Do you?”

George thrashed in his seat quietly.

“I do spy on people,” he said. “But I don’t spy on you, because anything I want to know about you I can ask, and you’ll tell the truth.”

Jesse grinned. “Not everybody does.”

“You have no idea,” George said in a voice that seemed to have blown in with an arctic outflow.

“Shit! Of course I do.”

“And you’re prepared to never know what I am.”

“George,” Jesse said cheerfully, “I get the impression sometimes that you don’t know what you are. And you keep talking about people who don’t exist, like your ‘mate’ and Michel.”

George chuckled.

“Oh, I assure you, they’re real. In fact —“ George said. He pulled a phone out of his pocket and checked it. Jesse shot his eyes over it; even upside-down he could see it wasn’t George’s usual phone, and the lettering on the text was Greek. If George kept multiple phones, he definitely had a double life. He remembered what George had said once, offhandedly.

My people speak medieval Greek as a common language.  Keeps people out of our business.

“Michel is here. He should be joining us for the move,” George said, and put the phone away.

“What?” Jesse said. He’d been fantasizing that George was the last of his kind, making up imaginary colleagues and friends so that he wouldn’t sound so lonely.

“Yeah,” George said.  He brightened. “Michel and I have a complicated history.  He tried to kill me once – it was more like several attempts over one short span of time — but we got over it pretty quick.  Now if I have a close friend in this world, it’s Michel.”

“You also have a mate,” Jesse said.

“True, but one relaxes with friends, and one never relaxes with Kima, there’s too much at stake,” George said, almost to himself.

“You’re trying to get her pregnant,” Jesse said, “You’ve mentioned that. Isn’t that relaxing?”

“Whatever you do,” George said, trying to laugh but not managing it. “Don’t say that to Michel, I’ll never hear the end of it. Mating is not relaxing.”

“You’re doing it wrong,” Jesse said thoughtlessly.

Whatever bad temper George had vented was not coming back. He laughed merrily and said, “Definitely, definitely do not not say that to Michel. He’s only here in town for Kima.”

“He wants your mate? And you’re okay with that. Are your people poly?”

George laughed again. “In ways yet undiscovered by humans, I suspect.  It is unusual, and socially suspect, to have long-lived attachments.  My parents did.” Abruptly he stopped talking. Like Jesse’s mother, George’s mother was a sore subject, although he’d been evasive about why.

 

Ten minutes later, with much less suavity than he normally showed, he was at it again.  Jesse kept fending him off and George kept trying to understand just what it was that could have happened to him to make Jesse so different. Jesse switched tactics, and threw himself across the front seat onto George. He did so in the expectation of three things.

1. George wouldn’t grunt or make any noise.

2. Whatever George did with his body would not match what Jesse saw with his eyes.

3. Jesse, no matter how hard he threw himself at George, would emerge unhurt.

George, who could sense Jesse was winding up for something but did not know what, fell back, said, “Oof!” and prevented Jesse’s head from hitting the inside of the passenger window with his hand.

“What are you doing?” George said in irritation.

“Sorry,” Jesse said automatically, and shoved himself back behind the steering wheel again. Jesse was surprised, and not surprised.  George sounded like a man who’d gotten the wind knocked out of him, so scratch that. He couldn’t say that what he saw, heard and felt was mismatched, although it seemed that George got a little blurry.

“You can predict what I’m going to do next, right?”

George didn’t answer right away.

Then he said, “You are one of the hardest people to read I ever met, even though your body language says you are an honest, open person.”

“You didn’t answer the question,” Jesse said.

“My people are not fond of the inquisition as a social form.”

“My people are not fond of evasive clownbags,” Jesse said.

“If I promise not to mock you, or laugh, or bring it up again, or tell anyone else, will you tell me what happened?”

“If you tell me why you want to know, when you generally don’t give two shits about my personal life, will I promise to consider it? I doubt it,” Jesse said. 

“Why is it so important?” George shrugged. “Idle curiosity.”

“Nope,” Jesse said.

“Nope,” George repeated blankly. “I’m telling you to your face it’s idle curiosity!”

“And I’m telling you to your face you’re lying, though I know I can’t prove it,” Jesse said, triumphant.

George looked at Jesse, frowned, and said, “Fine. Why do you think I’m asking?”

“Because you want to predict my behaviour,” Jesse said. “And did you just admit you were lying?”

“No,” said George.  Jesse smiled his three-cornered toddler smile and looked away.

“It’s okay, George,” Jesse said. “I know you can read minds.”

“No,” George said, with suppressed fury, “I can’t.”

“You can read something. C’mon, George! — you can smell human blood at 30 paces behind two doors! — what other tricks have you got up that fancy sleeve of yours?”

George threw open the passenger door so hard it nearly came off the hinges, slammed it so the truck reverberated and swiftly walked out of sight.

After about ten minutes he returned, got in and sat down. He stared directly ahead and didn’t speak. Jesse counted to thirty.

“Never saw you lose your temper before, George,” Jesse said.

“I don’t like being called a liar,” George said.

“Even if it’s true?” Jesse asked softly.

There was a short pause.

“Especially if it’s true,” George said.

“You’re obviously not like other people, what with your upbringing and your funny clothes and all,” Jesse said. “Do you know how strange you are?”

“Compared to what?” George asked. He almost sounded despairing.

“Just about everyone,” Jesse said. “But I like you, so it doesn’t much matter to me.”

There was another pause. Then, as if he really couldn’t help himself, George said, “What happened to you?”

Jesse said, “You’re not going to like it.”

“I know that already, from how resistant you’ve been.”

“Er, no. You sure have a high opinion of yourself. It’s because you’re an atheist.”

“How would that make a — oh, you’re kidding,” George, for once, looked nonplussed.

“Yup. Met a god. But that’s not the best part,” Jesse said.

“You did not meet a god,” George said, voice dropping into incredulity.

“Just one way of putting it.  The technical term is theophany.”

“If you think Lark turned into a god in front of you, you’re crazy.”

“Oh, it’s far worse than that,” Jesse said. “I was the god.”

“Humans have the most incredible capacity for self-delusion,” George said. “Every time I think I’ve plumbed it, the bottom drops out yet again.”

“While he was passing through,” Jesse said, as if he hadn’t heard this, “He told me to keep a very close eye on you. He specifically told me that you don’t belong here.”

George appeared to lose the power of speech. He looked at Jesse, his brown eyes stricken, and then got out of the truck again. He didn’t come back for half an hour, said nothing, and hardly spoke during the move.

They helped a woman after her roommate’s brother had drunkenly assaulted her in her sleep. The roommate was convinced it was the client’s fault, and the client was heartened that she didn’t have to listen to the same crap from the guys loading the truck.

Normally George came back with Jesse to drop off the truck. When they’d offloaded into the client’s parents’ place in Abbotsford, George said, “I’ll find my own way home,” and got out of the truck.

“Are you sure?” Jesse said, appalled.  “It’ll be a hundred bucks at least for a cab!”

“It’ll be worth it,” said George. As he walked away from the truck, Jesse watched him in the rear view mirror, and saw him vanish into thin air.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

George slowly descended the stairs, and pausing on the last step, called 911 while looking straight out the window.  The pounding continued, but it was a solid door, well-fitted to its frame, and it showed no sign of giving way.

He finished with,“There’s a very intoxicated and belligerent man at the most easterly door, where the patient is, so advise responders to go to the other entrance, where the buzzer is.”

He slowly put the phone away. “I have not tasted that knowledge yet,” George said, looking down at Drew, “that allows me to hope they’ll take my advice. And, really, since I caused this injury I should at least try to prevent the first responders from getting a tire iron in the face when they arrive.”

Hearing no sentient creature disagree, George performed minimal first aid (simultaneously moving Drew away from the sweep of the door), and with a deeply theatrical sigh, flung the door outward.

The young man he almost knocked over sprang up, drug-fuelled and hot-tempered, but found himself pinned before his rage could accomplish anything. George was as benignly gentle as an indulgent auntie collecting a toddler.

In a conversational tone (he had a hand over the young man’s mouth) he said, “Your liver and kidneys will be shot within a matter of years if you keep this up,” he said as he directed him back to the truck. “If unsafe sex for drug money is your idea of a career path you’re gonna die young and high. Along the way you’ll be a danger to others and a sad reflection on your kin, some of whom would welcome you back if you made the effort to get in right relation with them. Drew is a user, and not just of drugs; he thinks nothing of a nice middle class boy like Chris and you’ll be less than nothing to him when he’s done with you because he knows he can treat you worse.”

George took off the hand, and braced himself.

“He’s mine,” the young man said.

George made a sound. It could have been a bark, or a cough, or perhaps a suppressed laugh. “No friend of yours would ever say ‘you’re welcome to him’.  He’s whipping you up to kill Chris! You’ll be tried in adult court this time, you’re over eighteen aren’t you?”

The planes of his face shifted from defiant to surly. “I turned eighteen last week.”

“I bet the two of you celebrated by spending the evening threatening Chris.”

“Fuck you, he’s mine.”

George stopped arguing with himself. “Since we appear to have come to the end of what generously may be termed our civil intercourse, I must with sadness inform you that our recent cooperation in the unfolding of this evening’s events is now at an end.”

He had lifted the truck keys from Drew. Now he felt uneasy about busting him up so bad, but it had seemed like the best outcome, to have Drew at least sedated for the next little while, to be out of the hair of both of these poor men.

“I’m sorry.  These are cop-grade zip ties, so good luck getting free on your own. Maybe you’ll get lucky, maybe the cops will free you, but if you’re still sitting here in the morning I’ll bring you two McDonalds breakfasts and two cups of coffee.”

George tied him to the steering column. He had stopped resisting, which George really appreciated.

“Good thing I took a shit first,” the young man said. Then, with more emotion, “Is Drew dead? He didn’t look very alive.”

“He was alive with a steady pulse and only a very small bump on his head when I left him,” George said truthfully.  “I have to go and meet the firetruck. Please don’t scream.”

“I won’t, man, I fucking hate being gagged.”

“Good to know.”

Now, how to reduce the size and scale of the mess. If he was coaching a human, he’d say, “Deep breaths,” but there wasn’t really an equivalent for him. Nor did a pulse have much pull as a metaphor, since he had nothing like it. Humans can be seen pulsing and breathing at quite a distance. His own people often remarked on it, making much of their capacity for stillness.

Tingling, by comparison, he could identify with.  The sensation of being awestruck and speechless before something beautiful, or deadly, that some call transcendent wonder. To feel a cuff as a friendly blow exchanged between equals, or close to it. To be so attracted to a lover that your ability to move through the world as a seamless whole is fractured; there is only the world she is in, and everything else, which is a ludicrous, lonely journey through desperate spaces constructed of aching absence.

He didn’t want to compare Drew and his poor dupe here to himself and Kima. Perhaps that had been the point of the evening. He halted as he crossed the parking lot, even as the ambulance’s faint wail grew louder. He walked back to the truck, freed the man, gave him twenty dollars for breakfast and said, “If I was really compassionate I’d try to find you a hostel.”

“Was I in the apartment earlier?”

“Upstairs? There? Yes,” George said, pointing. George had perfect autobiographical memory, or allowed himself that illusion as it was close to being true, and could not understand how this man could just plain forget something that had happened literally minutes earlier. He had seen many, many examples of such lapses, and it always left him feeling shaky and incredulous, everybody off in their own reality, and terrible things happening when those realities touched.

“We did a line in the truck, I remember that,” he said. He slid out of the truck and said, “Peace, out.”

George went upstairs and was thrilled to see a note on the door from Jesse :

Boss, taking the truck back and Chris far far away to an inn. Door’s locked, key’s with me, we’ll come back tomorrow night.

And so it transpired. Drew was four weeks in hospital longer than he was supposed to be because he re-broke his leg. Chris moved to Mission and threw his obsessive temperament into helping his best friend from high school start a restaurant. The street kid they never saw again, although George always looked for him and eventually, as he built up his network of contacts, learned his name.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know your name,” George said suddenly, “My name’s George. It’s my guilty duty to inform you that I’m spying on Drew right now.”

“You are!?” she said.

“It seemed prudent,” Jesse said, mostly because he was tired of being the silent sidekick.

George shot him a look, then turning his attention back to the neighbour and briefly smiled that smooth, almost greasy, professional smile. Then the smile vanished. He looked almost apologetic. “They’re coming.  I planted a bug on Drew. You need to get back to your apartment, this instant.”

She stood and squeezed Chris’s hand, nodding. Then, with creditable speed and grace, Chris’s neighbour heeded George’s advice.  They heard her door quietly close and then the hisses and squelched giggling as the two men shushed themselves. George left the apartment door ajar and peered out as they dopily took the stairs.  He motioned Jesse and Chris into the kitchen, where they couldn’t be seen when the door opened wide. Jesse stood between Chris and the door and waited.

“Where’s Chris?” Drew asked. His boyfriend stood next to him, bouncing on the balls of his feet.

“Elsewhere,” George said.  “Leave or I’m calling the cops.”

Figuring it was two to one, they tried to crowd through the door.

George, with no apparent effort, pushed them both back and closed it.

Thunderous pounding and provocative cursing followed.

“Beat it,” said George through the door. “You’re holding Schedule I, II and IV drugs, you’ve been drinking and driving, and you’ve already committed mischief and uttered threats.  Unless you want to spend the night in the central lockup, get the fuck away from this door and shut up.”

There was shuffling, and then giggling again.

“They’re going to beat the door in with the fire extinguisher in the hall,” George said in disgust.  He jerked open the door as Drew tried to smash the door handle, and once again Drew fell over, this time onto his face, simultaneously discharging the fire extinguisher. In the chaos, the boyfriend started to scream and took off down the stairs like a scalded cat. The door to the parking lot banged and reverberated through the stairwell and corridor.

George hauled Drew to his feet and said, “I was going to call the cops, but honestly I don’t think that would help.”

Jesse bodily restrained Chris when he heard Drew’s voice.

“Fuck you,” Drew said. “Who the fuck do you think you are. If I want to talk to Chris you can’t stop me.”

“Wishin’ won’t make it so,” George said.  He shoved Drew, who was resisting vigorously, back out the door, and put a hand over his mouth since, once again, the volume had maxed out.

Then he pushed him down the stairs and called 911.

“Give me your phone.”

“Not a chance,” Chris said.

Jesse felt sorry for him.  He mentally predicted what would happen.  George will reach out an arm, yup, put it on his shoulder, and there ya go, Chris is off the stool, and for a second they look like they’re gonna dance, and then — called it! — George is standing back blinking with the phone in his left hand.

Chris tried to hit George.

Jesse couldn’t take it anymore, it was like watching a baby get punched out.  He scooted behind Chris, put his hands between Chris’s elbows and back, and said into his neck, “Nuh unh.”

“Get the fuck off me, ya goon, I need my phone!” Chris said, pumping his feet uselessly and squirming.

“And you’ll find it, with its battery, once you unpack,” George said. “In the meantime I don’t want you to have easy access to Drew’s social media, or the texts he never stops sending you, or the texts his new squeeze sends you for fun when Drew hands his phone over.”

“What?”

“Textual analysis indicates two different kinds of illiteracy,” George said, looking at Chris’s phone.

“All this and a grammar Nazi too?” Jesse asked, aghast. Raven was always going on about how class and worth were policed and bounded by a narrow and stultifying interpretation of grammar rules that were dying at the time they were first codified. From this Jesse had slowly and painfully extracted the idea that you shouldn’t assign moral value to another person’s chosen mode of communication. He painfully resisted this conclusion, mentioning people like Derrida and McLuhan (whom he only knew about because Raven was always going off about them) and he kept coming up with exceptions until Raven got mad at him for being so pointillistic. “Quit looking at the dots and look at the whole picture!!” she would say. It had been a relief when she stopped going to university and got into local activism and shelter work instead.

He didn’t hear George say, “If textual analysis helps me figure out that both of them are involved in gas-lighting Chris, yes.”

“Wait a minute,” Chris said slowly. “How did you get access to my texts.”

“I’m looking at them, and I’m listening to them send you one.  You know that them texting you is against the peace bond you swore out, right? Ditching your old phone and getting a new one would really help with that now.”

“I can’t get next to removing Chris’s agency like this,” Jesse said. He knew George would ignore him, but if he didn’t make it clear he was on Chris’s side he’d never get him out of the apartment when the time came. It still was not clear to Jesse where Chris was going to end up or whether he would even come out of his emotional coma and flee like a sensible person, and George was in a mood he’d never previously displayed.  He knew George would be perfectly happy to restrain and remove Chris, but Jesse was already tiring of this approach to miscreants, as much fun as it had been at first; to decide it was the appropriate way to treat clients tonight seemed a bridge too far.

He knew that was one of the reasons George was so adamant about being paid up front, a rule he’d broken twice, once with a happy outcome and once with a night which had been expensive and painful and humiliating even before the police had arrived. But as George said, if he got paid up front, he still had the money if they decided not to like him afterward.

“I don’t want to go to the police,” Chris said plaintively.  He was in his late thirties, but apart from a tiny paunch, he looked a decade younger, and younger still in his misery.

“Then don’t,” Jesse said. “But you have to get out of here tonight, and go someplace safe, and let us deal with them if they come back. The last time you were lucky you didn’t get hit in the head with flying glass.”

“They’re still out there. I think they’re snorting something, they sound a little confused,” George said, putting his finger to his ear.

“Couldn’t you have lifted that off them while you were planting the bug?” Jesse said, referring to the drugs they were ingesting.

“It was in the car,” George said, shrugging.

“I can’t not have a phone,” Chris said.

George pulled out a burner and held it and Chris’s Samsung up. Gesturing with them, he said, “You can have this one. You’ll get this one back when things have died down. If they did turn on tracking, the battery’s out now, and that’ll prevent you from giving away your location. Since he knows where you work, you should either quit, go on vacation or ask for a leave of absence.”

“I can’t do that,” Chris said numbly.

What a fucking gumptionless numpty this guy is, Jesse thought. His feelings did not show on his face. And he’s a victim of the worst domestic violence I’ve seen so far. My history of abuse and my understanding of the mechanics of DV mean nothing.  I see a man in this situation, and rather than pity I have contempt.  What a long fucking way I have to go, Jesse thought.

“Well, you should,” George said in a much more reasonable and pleasant voice than he’d previously used. “They’re actually plotting to kill you.”

George pulled the earbud out, and once again, before Jesse could get a good look at it, he swiftly put it in Chris’s left ear. Chris jerked his head away, and said, “That’s freezing.”

Then, as he heard their voices, hotly contesting how they should kill him, and where and when, laughing with harsh ragged hoots, pounding the dashboard, his eyebrows rose higher and higher and higher. He listened for perhaps two minutes, an eternity to Jesse as he watched the hurt and confusion rush in successive waves across Chris’s face. Then George, reading his body language, plucked the earbud out before Chris could touch it. Chris sagged. His eyes were wet, but he didn’t weep. He made a hiccupping noise which might have been a sob.

“Will you leave now?” George asked Chris, exasperated.

His mouth opened and closed. He took a breath and said, very quietly, “I guess I have to. How could he? I knew he was a diamond in the rough —“

Holy shit, thought Jesse.

“ — but I never thought he could do something like this.  It’s that fucking drug addict new boyfriend of his. If he was gone Drew and I could go back to how it was —“

And again, thought Jesse.

George broke up the sweet alternate reality reunion which was happening in Chris’s head. “Uh, Drew is talking about sawing your head off and the two of them taking turns having sex with your neck. Chris, I truly think the barque of reconciliation has shoved off — and now he’s snorting something again,” George said in disgust.  “I don’t think he should be driving,” he concluded uneasily.

“You could always zap strap them to the steering column until this is over.” Jesse said.

“I’d love to, but a) you hate it when I do that — “ at which Jesse made a mild sound of disbelief  “— and b) I’d prefer it if whatever they’re tied to is a long way from here. We still have a lot of work to do.”

“It isn’t Drew, it’s the drugs,” Chris said anxiously.  “He’s really a very cool guy.”

George said, “He’s put you in hospital twice.”

“He’s got a temper,” Chris said.

George pulled at his face with one hand like a cartoon character, and then said, “You’ve been abused by Drew for a long time, and you’re in a very precarious mental state. Can you trust us to look after your long term interests tonight? It’s hard to believe now, but your situation will look and feel different to you when you’ve got some distance.  You have more friends than you know; they’ve all been scared off by Drew.”

“If they were my real friends, they would love Drew as much as I do,” Chris said.

“No they wouldn’t!” Jesse said, more energetically than he intended.

“You can love someone body and mind without sacrificing your one wild precious life to him,” George said, and the anger had now vanished, leaving only a melting sadness.

There was a bang on the door.

Chris jumped.

“Showtime,” said Jesse.

“Oh God,” Chris said, and folded himself up into a tight ball on the sofa, arms wrapped around his knees.

George, who didn’t look concerned, answered the door to a stout black woman in her mid-forties, who started when she saw George and then looked past him to Chris.  “You know Drew’s in the parking lot, right?”

“Has Drew ever bothered you?” George asked.

“Bothered?” the woman asked. Her tone was gentle, but she frowned.

“You okay, Chris?” she called into the apartment.

“No. Drew wants to kill me,” he called back.  He had started to shake, very slightly.

“You gotta get out of here! It isn’t safe.”

“We’re trying,” George said. “We haven’t figured out where the furniture is going or where he’s going to stay.”

“May I come in?”

She picked her way across the floor, along a pathway cleared of debris, and sat, bolt upright, next to Chris.

Seeing his distress, she sagged a trifle. She put a hand on his knee and looked into his face. “Chris you’ve got to leave. He’s on fire, and you’re gasoline,” she said tenderly.

“Okay,” he said, and his voice broke. 

Returned inside with the bin, he pulled it closer to the worst of the carnage and said to Chris, “I think George scared them off.” Jesse was relieved when George slipped in behind him a moment later and locked the door.

George said, “They’re sitting in Drew’s truck, trying to work each other up into having a shot at me since I’m obviously a circus acrobat and not a combat fighter.”

Jesse said, “Heugh! Like either of them are.” It was irritating to know that George would mop the floor with both of them and yet be unable to bet on the outcome.

George stared at Jesse. “He is most assuredly a karateka of some renown! — but that doesn’t help if you fall over backward when startled.”

“Yes,” Jesse said. “After that, it’s all grappling and ground game.”

Chris said, “I don’t even think I can go through with this. Maybe I can get an extension from the landlord.” It was month end.  Chris veered between low-grade panic, snarky humour and catatonia. Panic was definitely winning.

George was dismissive. “You’ve paid us, we’re here, you’re in shock, sit down, shut up.” Jesse looked at him.

“I will not,” Chris said.

“Please keep talking, but sit down,” Jesse said, and walked noisily through the mess and stood with him.

This being a much more palatable request, Chris sat down and stared up at him. Jesse bore the attenuated but still irritating assessment of his fitness-to-bang with as good grace as he could, and moved away to find something useful to do. There was a lot of broken glass, but the squeeze had only found some of the kitchen boxes, and it looked worse than it was.

“You don’t have a lot of sympathy for people in this situation, do you,” Chris said, addressing George.

Jesse didn’t let the smirk reach his lips, but his eyebrows missed the memo. “That’s enough out of you, Jesse,” George said.

“Me? What? Fuck d’I do?”

George didn’t answer the customer right away, and considered Jesse’s question unanswerable.  He found the broom and the dustpan where Chris had let them drop in the dining area, carefully moved to the far wall of the kitchen, and started to push broken glass into the middle of the floor. The sound of the sweeping, and the crunching, sliding glass, was rhythmically interspersed with George’s response.

“I have sympathy for few people in few situations,” George said. “Victims of domestic violence get what little I have, in the form of a service to help them stay safe, and keep all their belongings safe, during periods when the cops won’t help them because there’s no threat, and their friends won’t help them because their friends absolutely know there is a threat, and hope that by avoiding helping they may also avoid the brutal treatment they know is likely. I make people pay for the service, and if this culture wasn’t a pile of maggots feasting on a dying planet, I’d have no reason to take your money because you’d never have taken up with such a person. You’d have had the sense not to, since you would have been raised properly, and he wouldn’t be an asshole, because ditto.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Jesse said, appalled that George would say such a thing to a customer.  In the truck, afterward, on the way home, sure, let ‘er rip, but holy fuck. And is he reefing on Chris so hard because he’s a guy? Or gay? He looked at George, no longer trusting what he thought he knew about him.

Chris sat on a kitchen stool and looked at George, stricken. After a second he dropped his eyes and watched the floor slowly be cleared of its burden of shards with slow, steady strokes.

“You’re saying I asked for this,” Chris said. “You’re blaming the victim.”

George stopped, and remained awkwardly posed.

“No, sir,” George said coldly, sweeping again. “By no means. I’m saying you’re lucky you can buy your way out of the problem. This problem, the one we’re dealing with right now. We can have you out of here by dawn. I have a storage facility I will let you use for sixty days at no charge, but I have three conditions, each one of which you’re going to hate more than the last.”

“I’m the customer,” Chris bleated.

Jesse blew through his lips and quietly said, “Like that means fuck all in end-stage crony capitalism.”

George fixed a quelling gaze on Jesse, and then said to Chris, “You don’t have a place to move your stuff to, unless you have connections or qualities so far unrevealed.”

“You are a fucking prick, you know that?”

No argument here, Jesse thought, once again trying to keep the smirk on the inside.

“I am the very model of a rational social justice warrior, and you need to give me your phone, leave this apartment by cab and report the damage in person to the police, indicating that you’ve left the movers in the apartment so they don’t come in and try to thump us on general principles. Then you need to go to the last place he’d ever look for you. We’ll move your stuff into the locker. I’d come back and clean but by the looks of things it would make no difference to your security deposit. The kindest thing you can do for your landlord is get the hell out so she can fix it.”

He contemplated what looked like a lot of drywall work for a handyman; enough for a weekend, anyway.  There were holes, some gaping and dramatic, others like a succession of hammer head impressions, made in a row to illustrate some point.

George continued, “I’ve got a spare key and and card for the locker, which I will give to you, so it’s not like we’re trying to run off with your stuff. We witnessed the two of them exiting the building and heard lots of screaming, and you’d already asked us to help you move, as will be evidenced by the phone records, if it comes to that. You have witnesses and a good timeline, and those two morons are still out there in the truck.”

To Jesse he said, “I planted a listening device,” and briefly pulled out and waggled an earbud, replacing it before Jesse could get too close a look.

George said, “Now I have to say something that’s going to be hard to listen to.”

“Oh really,” Chris said. “Because everything’s just been a Roger Whittaker song up ’til now.”

Jesse, who had found another dustpan brush and was removing glass from the cloth furniture, coughed. Or at least, so he hoped it would be interpreted.

There was a door slam.  Two men exited the apartment onto the shared balcony, bolted down the stairs and took off.

George said. “Either the police have been called or somebody threatened to call them.”

“Looks like.”

George said, “We should wait until he calls.”

Jesse said, “Okay. Anyway, Rhonda came down to see us a couple of times, and that was it.  I haven’t seen my mother in almost ten years, and nothing she says or does will ever put me in a room with her again. My gift to her is not killing her. Well, that and learning to understand the source of family violence and how it echoes through generations.  If a man she knew had done to a girl-child what that fucking maniac did to me, she would have brained him with the nearest paperweight. She can’t see the hypocrisy of this but I know she’s crazy, not an emblem of all womanhood. I was abused by a feminist, but feminism gave me the legal tools to escape from her, so I’m not going to ditch feminism just because my mother was a flaming asshole.”

George’s phone rang.

“Hello,” he said, putting it on speaker.

Their client’s voice was tired and distraught. “Hi, it’s Chris. I have to clean this mess before we can do anything… can you wait half an hour?”

Jesse waggled his eyebrows and shrugged to show he was happy to help clean up.

“Not a problem. We can help. We’re just across the street,” George said, “See you in a minute.”

Chris’s ex Drew, and his not-to-be-named herpes-ridden rent-boy side-piece (Chris’s take on him, not theirs) had done a spectacular job of wrecking the apartment.  They had indeed knocked a hutch over. Jesse spent the first five minutes of the move trying to talk Chris into for fuck’s sake putting sturdier shoes on. His flip-flops were a health hazard, Jesse said sternly, and he stood over Chris as he found a broken-glass-free chair to sit in, and swapped shoes.

“Much better,” said Jesse. “Hokay, let’s get the broken stuff in a plastic container,” and volunteered to go downstairs to get a wheelie-bin for the debris.

As he was sorting through the bins to find one that was empty, and with luck not too smelly, Chris’s ex and current squeeze got out of their car and approached him.  Not having George’s hearing, he didn’t notice until they were upon him.

“So you’re Chris’s new boyfriend,” the younger one said.

“Jesse,” Jesse said, sticking out his hand.

Finding no takers, he ignored them and hauled the bin up the stairs.

“If you’re not crazy now, you will be,” Drew yelled after him.

“I’m not the one who trashed Chris’s apartment,” Jesse said. “If ya don’t want two years less a day in Agassiz for mischief, under Section 430 of the Criminal Code, kindly to fuck off now.”

“It’s his word against ours,” Drew said.

Jesse burst out laughing.

“My partner and I were watching from across the street,” he said, enunciating his contempt with care, “And while I don’t see George going to court, I’m happy to testify.  Now get lost before George gets hold of you, that guy will fuck you up.”

“Someone call my name?” George said with greasy amiability, coming out onto the landing and looking at their upturned faces.

Jesse gave George a little wave and then stabbed his finger down at Drew and his noisy little chum. “Okay, I warned you two fuckers, it’s time to take out the trash in East Van,” Jesse said.

He looked back at George.

“I can’t watch what happens next, it’s too upsetting,” he said with mock sadness.

“I’m a brown belt in karate,” Chris said, and took up a stance. Jesse shook his head. “Seriously,” he said under his breath.

“Good, good!” George said. “But it won’t help.”

Jesse was not able to give much credence to his eyes for what happened next. It seemed to him that George threw himself down the stairs, cleared Jesse (and the bin) by perhaps 10 centimetres and then bounced on his left arm like it was a pogo stick. Spinning right way up, he landed on his feet about a meter from Drew, bending his legs only slightly and not even grunting. Faced by this apparent suspension of the laws of physics, Drew was so startled that he fell over backward with a cry.  The other man, yelling, “Jesus! What the fuck, man?” backed up at speed but stayed on his feet, his eyes out on stalks.

“Boo,” George said pleasantly. “Do either of you want to go?”

Drew’s buddy hauled him to his feet, and with many a curse and slur, the two of them booked it. They stood by the car, gazing wildly at the back door of Chris’s building and waving their arms.  

“You know,” Jesse said, face screwed up, “If a fully grown adult man throws his entire weight onto his arm, it breaks.  He doesn’t bounce like Tigger.”

“The circus is in my blood,” George said, as he climbed the stairs.

Since Jesse could not think of anything to say that didn’t involve calling George a monstrous new specimen of liar, he returned to the task of helping the client.

By the end of the summer of 2013 George liked and trusted Jesse as much as he could remember trusting anyone.  He had tried to like Ágnes’ special friend, back in the day in Budapest, but there had been a quiet accumulation of insults from Mátyás and he hadn’t the temperament to pretend to be his friend.  It was as an act of penance for ever being that much of a poltroon that he maintained his waxen civility, able at any time to cool into a pleasing shape or disperse in heat and light, and smoke, for George saw much of himself in Mátyás. In the way he clung to Agnes, and moaned about her sex work, he reminded George of his bad–tempered pleading with his own mother. 

He had pretensions to being a revolutionary too, and George had distinct notions of what the order of operations would have to be to take down the current régime, while Mátyás was full of pamphlets and empty of practical notions like how to keep the proletariat fed properly and transportation and power production running while the grim legal stuff like a new constitution was worked out.  He liked demonstrations, and George loathed them. “By all means, Mátyás, let’s put all the state’s enemies into one cozy pile in the middle of a lovely broad intersection across which troops can have a spiffing field of fire and when you’re done with that carnage you can watch the previously injured randomly be crushed by men on horseback or stand up to flee merely to be pounced on at the first choke point and hauled off in wagons. Foolishness. Absolute foolishness.”   

Family lore said large gatherings of anything were a criminally bad idea.  He had said that offhandedly to Jesse once.

Jesse said, “I’m going to have to start keeping track of your family lore.  Tell me again about the not driving.”

“We don’t drive ourselves; we hire vehicles,” George said.  

“While living in rural Romania, nay, even Transylvania.” Jesse briefly considered imitating Bela Lugosi but decided against it.

“I can’t help where I was born,” George said tartly.

“Or how,” Jesse said. “I’m getting a mental image of your mother riding on horseback to the delivery room like a boss.”

“You’re not getting that mental image from me; she was never on a horse in her life. I was born at home, as is proper. Being born in a dirty, badly-lit hotel full of strangers with ghastly infections is no way to start life,” George said.

“Were you guys Roma?” Jesse said, believing he’d at last figured it out.

“No,” George said. “If I was Roma I’d still be there. They are not often given a chance to emigrate.”

He changed the subject. “You haven’t told me much about your family, except Raven, who seems to be a species of angel.”

“The name-taking, ass-kicking kind,” Jesse said amiably.  He’d started to study how George could dodge a direct question, and with some downtime, now was as good a time as any to practice.

They were waiting for the all-clear from the client. There was some kind of three way slap-fight going on up there, and if the police weren’t called, one of the combatants would eventually stomp off and he and George could finally get in. At one point, from the café across the street, where the harassed manager had allowed them to sit on the patio after closing, as long as they put the chairs away, they’d heard something wooden crash, with a spatter of exploding crockery, like a cabinetful of Royal Doulton getting knocked down some stairs.

“You don’t talk about your mother,” George said.

Jesse scowled.  “You know she abused me; I told you that, and you never forget anything.”

“I’m very fortunate to have an excellent memory for the spoken word. How were you abused?” George asked, and got another scowl.  George said in a flat voice, “It’s hard for me to say how my mother abused me, because not everyone who witnessed it thought it was abuse, and a child needs to be believed before the abuse is real. Before anyone believes you, it’s just how things are, at least as far as the child’s concerned. I had something wrong with me, health problems I’ve since more or less grown out of.”

Jesse said, “She bullied you because you were weak.” George certainly despised weakness now, even as he took steps to protect it with that unselfconscious superiority of his.

“Almost to death,” George said. “It wasn’t what she did, it’s what she let others do.”

Much of the time Jesse thought he wouldn’t be able to tell if George was lying; he had no tells. Now he was convinced that George was being truthful, although he knew he had no way of confirming anything he said.

“My mother was not physically abusive, but she didn’t have to be,” Jesse said. “She terrorized all of us, but I got it worst because my mother hates men, and I was a little man and going to be a big one, just like my useless sperm donor father, and no matter how she tried to make me a good man, I was still a man. And then of course her sister got pregnant by the same guy three months before she did and when Rhonda told them, he took off without learning that he’d also knocked my mother up. She was a little tetched even then.”

“And yet you’ve managed to be a feminist. I’ve observed you very closely,” George said.

Feminism doesn’t stop being necessary just because my mother never got a diagnosis, Jesse thought. Aloud he said, “She didn’t hit me. But I wasn’t really a human being to her. Rhonda did what she could. When she was twelve, Raven decided to run away from home with me, and when we were fourteen, she made it happen.”

“Running away from home can be dangerous.”

“The exact opposite. We went to school.  It was fucking amazing. We got a year and a half in the regular system in the Interior when HellMom took to her bed and didn’t homeschool us anymore, so we managed to get caught up to our grade levels. It wasn’t too hard, academically, anyway, getting from where we were to an alternative high school in New Westminster, and it was on the Skytrain line, and we lived in a fucking dump of a one bedroom apartment and went to school 24/7. Raven got a scholarship and went to UBC.” Jesse closed his mouth and compressed his lips. There had been another crash from across the street, and one of the voices had risen to a shriek.

Jesse had never seen George eat, or show interest in a woman, or take a personal phone call, or drive a car (he claimed not to know how), or do any banking, unless you considered his apparently endless supply of cash to be some form of banking, or go to the washroom except as a ruse (although Jesse admitted to himself that if George really did have some kind of digestive problem that only allowed him to take a shit during a household move it was probably okay to feel sorry for him) or drink a beer, or, indeed, anything, or take a bong hit, or admit to watching current television, or talk about any celebrities, or show much interest in politics that wasn’t local, or show any interest in sports (besides a not always compellingly sincere appreciation of sports as a demonstration of fitness.) It was telling that he didn’t care if athletes used performance enhancing drugs.

Jesse solemnly asked for his opinion, and his bloviation was unleashed. “What a ludicrous question. Since the bar is set at detection, virtually everyone is doing it, and trying to follow whatever protocols will allow them to pass whatever inane, inconsistent and media-infested tests which are applied to them during their careers. Some have good doctors and canny coaches and some don’t, but with a few honest exceptions, most athletes are doping, and they’d be fools not to.”

Jesse started laughing. “You don’t even watch sports!” Jesse said.  He followed Junior A hockey, it being the only game he could imagine himself playing, but not much else. Soccer was oka-a-ay as long as it wasn’t one of those fucking snore-fests, all about the defence, and long boring stretches of nothing happening but some sonorous wanker with a deferential English accent going on about nothing to do with the game. “And yet somehow you always have an opinion,” Jesse added.

“In that, how do I differ from anyone else?” George said, apparently offended.  “I have an opinion about excellence, and I’m not as fussy as you about where the excellence comes from.”

“Spoken like a man being supported by his girlfriend,” Jesse ventured.

“Oh no,” George said, smiling a weird little smile. “That teat has been decently tucked away.” Then, poking Jesse, who resentfully said, “Ow!” he added, “And that was a sexist remark.  There’s no reason for me to feel guilty about that if it doesn’t bother her.”

“Wait a minute. You’re kidding. She cut you off?”

“Um. I’m trying — trying to think of a compassionate way of putting this,” George said, as if he didn’t give much for his chances.

“Tell me straight, doc, am I dyin’?” Jesse said. He was concerned about the business, and would have a hard time without George, and didn’t feel like hiding that he knew this.  George took it the wrong way, but not in a bad way.

“Screw you,” George said amiably. “She has projects which require all the cash both of us can raise.  Since I, too, will profit immensely from the positive outcome of these projects, I am helping her with the sales and turning the proceeds over, less the bank charges of course, because I can’t run it all cash, as much as I’d like to. And, of course, there’s the difficulty associated with keeping the transaction sizes small enough that they don’t raise the attention of the feds, also a concern. But — I have to raise enough money to be taken seriously, or this whole project won’t work.”

Jesse got that whiff of fantasy again, and poked. “How much money.”

“I can’t see doing it for less than twenty million dollars,” George said. He didn’t sound worried.  He sounded like a man considering what he said, as he said it. 

Jesse was entranced. “What is it? An indie film project?” He could see having some fun with this sunny-tempered grandiosity. “World’s first 3D Zero-G porn film?”

George, laughing, sputtered something in a language Jesse didn’t recognize. “I should keep that in the queue as a potential money maker,” he said, sobering. “Good suggestion! Good talk!” and Jesse knew that the moment of honesty, during which George revealed himself as an anxious man, and possibly as a full-stop lunatic, had floated away.

He had spent intense bursts of time these last three months with George, and still had no idea what the hell he was up to. He didn’t lie about anything Jesse thought was important, but he’d evaded basic questions about his past.

In retrospect it had been the right thing to do, but Jesse remembered the disbelief — which started as a blast of heat between his eyes and rapidly spread to his whole face — when George had handed over their whole take to the nanny. The fairytale ending was the stack of bills he’d made a slick for in the bedroom door of his co-op house in Strathcona, but there had been no way to expect that outcome when a well-connected Communist Party scion married to a multi-millionaire’s daughter shoved a gun in his face.

George lived a charmed life, and a lot of it happened where and when Jesse couldn’t see him. It was part of the fascination, and the lion’s share of the aggro.

He couldn’t sneak up on him.  The fucker was uncanny, always knew where he was. He’d considered it, but there seemed to be no point in paying to have someone else follow him when he was that careful of his surroundings. During his most aggrieved and somnambulant plotting, Jesse thought of bugging George’s apartment but that didn’t seem wise. George had a knack for noticing security cameras and more than once had stopped Jesse from doing something stupid in plain view.