in the tunnel under lake ontario two men shake hands on an incline of mud. beside them a pickaxe and a lamp, their dirt-streaked faces pivoting to look towards the camera. for a moment, while the film receives the image, everything is still, the other tunnel workers silent. then arthur goss, the city photographer, packs up his tripod and glass plates, unhooks the cord of lights that creates a vista of open tunnel behind the two men, walks with his equipment the fifty yards to the ladder, and climbs out into sunlight. work continues. the grunt into hard clay. the wet slap. men burning rock and shattering it wherever they come across it. filling hundreds of barrels with liquid mud and hauling them out of the tunnel. in the east end of the city a tunnel is being built out under the lake in order to lay intake pipes for the new waterworks. it is 1930. the cut of the shovel into clay is all patrick sees digging into the brown slippery darkness. he feels the whole continent in front of him. they dig underneath one of the largest lakes in north america beside a hissing lamp, racing with the speed of their shadows. each blow against the shale wall jars up from the palms into the shoulders as if the body is hit. exhaustion overpowers patrick and the other tunnellers within twenty minutes, the arms itching, the chest dry. then an hour more, then another four hours till lunch, when they have thirty minutes to eat. during the eight-hour shifts no one speaks. patrick is as silent as the italians and greeks towards the bronco foremen. for eight hours a day the air around them rolls in its dirty light. from somewhere else in the tunnelthere is the permanent drone of pumps attempting to suck out the water, which is constantly at their heels. all morning they slip in the wet clay unable to stand properly, pissing where they work, eating where someone else left shit. as the muckers move forward with their picks and shovels, the gunnite crew sprays a mixture of concrete and sand onto the walls, which would otherwise crumble after a few hours of exposure to the air. and if they are digging incorrectly – just one degree up, burrowing too close to the weight of lake ontario during this mad scheme by commissioner harris to collect lake water 3,300 yards out in the lake? they have all imagined the water heaving in, shouldering them aside in a fast death. whenever the tunnellers reach large walls of rock or shale beds the foreman clears the tunnel and the transportation mules are herded back. then patrick separates himself from the others. he removes his belt that has the buckle, pats his wet clothes for any other sign of metal, and hoists the box of dynamite onto his shoulder. with a lamp he walks towards the far reaches of the tunnel alone. there is no sound here – no wind, no noise of work. he hears only the slosh of his feet tromping through water, his own breathing in the darkness. at the end of the tunnel he holds the lamp up against the dark wall, trying to imagine the structure of the rock in front of him, the shape, its possible fissures. he puts the lamp down and augers out holes for the sticks of dynamite. only at these times are his eyes close to what he digs into all day. the burn of the lamp spills against the wet earth as he works. once it revealed the pale history of a fossil, a cone-shaped cephalopod, which he sheared free and dropped into his pocket. although he dynamites for the foreman, most of the time patrick works with the muckers in the manual digging. he is paid extra for each of the charges laid. nobody else wants the claustrophobic uncertainty of this work, but for patrick this part is the only ease in this terrible place where he feels banished from the world. he carries out the old skill he learned from his father – although then it had been in sunlight, in rivers, logs tumbling over themselves slowly in the air. he sidewinds the powder fuse, which will burn at two minutes to the yard, and ignites it. he picks up the lamp and begins his walk back to the others. there is no hurry, there is no other light in the tunnel but this one lamp and as he moves his shadow shifts like a giant alongside him. when he reaches the others at the shaft he hears with them the crumple of noise as the shale displaces and the rock splinters into shards and flints in the far darkness under the lake. as the day progresses heat rises in the tunnel. the men remove their shirts and hammer them into the hard walls with spikes. patrick can recognize other tunnellers on the way home by the ragged hole in the back of their shirts. it is a code among them, like the path of a familiar thick bullet in the left shoulder blade. at the end of the day they climb from the tunnel into the desert of construction which had been victoria park forest, where the waterworks is now being built. they see each other's bodies steaming in the air. patrick embraces the last of the light on the walk home. in the dry air the clay hardens on clothing, whitens his arms and hair. he takes a knife and cuts free the mud between his boots and trouser cuffs, brushes the blade over the laces to loosen them. in his wyatt avenue room he drops all his clothes in a corner, feeds theiguana, and crawls into bed. he picks the clothes up again at six in the morning hard as armour and bangs them against the wall of the fire escape till they crack apart and soften, the dust in the air around him. at the thompson grill he eats breakfast in ten minutes. he reads no paper, just watches the hands of the waitress break open the eggs. as he goes underground the humidity will fall back into his clothes quick as rain. carrying three lanterns, the crew of nine men walks towards the end of the tunnel. already they can smell each other and the sweat from the previous days, the lamp wick raised to burn out odour. they can hear the mules and pit-horses who live down here, transporting the dug earth and mud barrels to the ladder. when these creatures were lowered down the shaft by rope they had brayed madly, thinking they were being buried alive. patrick and the others walk silently, remembering the teeth of the animals distinct, that screaming, the feet bound so they wouldn't slash out and break themselves, lowered forty feet down and remaining there until they died or the tunnel reached the selected mark under the lake. and when would that be? the brain of the mule no more and no less knowledgeable than the body of a man who dug into a clay wall in front of him. above ground, like the blossoming of a tree, the excavations and construction were also being orchestrated. the giant centrifugal pumps, more valuable than life, were trolleyed into place with their shell-shaped impellers that in commissioner harris' dream would fan the water up towards the settling basins. cranes lowered 800 tons of steel sheet piling rolled in sault ste. marie. trucks were driving in the bricks from cooksville. from across the province the subcontractors brought in their products and talents to build a palace for water. richie cut stone company, raymond concrete, heather & little roofing and sheet metal, ornamental iron from architectural bronze and iron works, steel sashes from canadian metal window and steel works, elevators from otis-fenson and turnbull, glazing from hobbs glass, plasterers from strauss & scott, overhead doors from the richard wilcox canadian company. the bavington brothers sent painters, bennett and wright were responsible for heat and ventilation, the linoleum came from t. eaton company, the mastic flooring from vulcan asphalt. mazes of electricity were laid down by canadian comstock, alexander murray composed the floor design. the tiling and terrazzo were by italian mosaic and tile company. harris had dreamed the marble walls, the copper-banded roofs. he pulled down victoria park forest and the essential temple swept up in its place, built on the slope towards the lake. the architect pomphrey modelled its entrance on a byzantine city gate, and the inside of the building would be an image of the ideal city. the brass railings curved up three flights like an immaculate fiction. the subtle splay on the tower gave it an egyptian feel. harris could smell the place before it was there, knew every image of it as well as his arms west wing, east wing. the depression and the public outcry would slow it all down, but in spite of that half of it would be completed within a year. "the form of a city changes faster than the heart of a mortal," harris liked to remind his critics, quoting baudelaire. he was providing jobs as he had in the building of the bloor street viaduct, the st. clair reservoir, the men hired daily for grading, clearing bush, removing stumps, and riprapping the sides of streams. the commissioner would slide these facts out, bounce them off his arms like oranges to journalists. but harris was building it for himself. for a stray dream he'd always had about water, water they shouldhave taken across the bloor street viaduct as he proposed. no one else was interested in water at this time. harris imagined a palace for it. he wanted the best ornamental iron. he wanted a brass elevator to lead from the service building to the filter building where you could step out across rose-coloured marble. the neo-byzantine style allowed him to blend in all the technical elements. the friezes depicted stylized impellers. he wanted herringbone tiles imported from siena, art deco clocks and pump signals, unfloored high windows which would look over filter pools four feet deep, languid, reflective as medieval water gardens. but first he needed to finish the spear of tunnel a mile out under the lake and organize the human digging and the human-and-mule dragging of pipes all the way out there for the intake of water. this was the other tentacle of his dream. the one that reached out and clung to him in a nightmare where faces peered out, working in that permanent rain of condensation. he had sent goss and his photographers down but he had not entered the tunnels himself. he was a man who understood the continuity of the city, the daily consumptions of water, the speed of raw water through a filter bed, the journeys of chlorine and sulphur dioxide to the island filtration plant, the 119 inspections by tugboats each year of the various sewer outfalls, and the approximate number of valves and caissons of the east toronto pumping stations, and the two miles a year of watermain construction – from the st. clair reservoir to the high-level pumping station – and the construction of the john street surge tank. . . . this was choreography in 1930. in those photographs moisture in the tunnel appears white. there is a foreman's white shirt, there is white lye daubed onto rock to be dynamited. and all else is labour and darkness. ash grey faces. an unfinished world. the men work in the equivalent of the fallout of a candle. they are in the foresection of the cortex, in the small world of rowland harris' dream as he lies in bed on neville park boulevard. such a strange dream for him. the silence of men coming out of a hole each within an envelope of steam. horses under lake ontario. swallowing the water one-and-a-quarter miles away, bringing it back into his body, and spitting it out clean. *** patrick ate most of his meals at the thompson grill on river street where the waitress, through years of habit, had reduced to a minimum the action of pouring coffee or flipping an egg. he could spot the oil burns on her wrists, the permanent grimace in her eye from the smoke. if she looked at those who ate here it occurred when they were not aware of it. she seemed self-sufficient, something underwater in the false yellow light of the narrow room against the street, the flawed glass creating shadows in the air. there was something transient about her though she had been there for years. most of the chewers at the thompson grill had that quality. patrick would sit at an uncleared section so he could watch the fingers of her left hand pluck up the glasses and cups while the other hand, the muscles in intricate movement under the skin, swabbed the counter clean. it was several months before he became aware of the tattoo high on her arm, seeing it through a tear in the seam where the cotton had loosened.

he came to believe she had the powers of a goddess who could condemn or bless. she would be able to transform the one she touched, the one she gripped at the wrist with her tough hand, the muscles stiffening up towards the blue-black of the half-revealed creature that pivoted on the bone of her shoulder. his eyes wanted to glimpse nothing else. he pinned the note, saying waterworks – sunday 8 p.m. to the wall above his bed in case he forgot, though it had been his only invitation in two years. "the cheese stands alone," he'd sing to himself, while buying groceries along eastern avenue. patrick loved that song. he found himself muttering "the farmer takes the dog . . . the farmer takes the dog" among the macedonians, as if perfecting a password. the southeastern section of the city where he now lived was made up mostly of immigrants and he walked everywhere not hearing any language he knew, deliriously anonymous. the people on the street, the macedonians and bulgarians, were his only mirror. he worked in the tunnels with them. he had discovered the macedonian word for iguana, gooshter, and finally used it to explain his requests each evening at the fruit stall for clover and vetch. it was a breakthrough. the woman gazed at him, corrected his pronunciation, and yelled it to the next stall. she came around the crates and outlined the shape of a lizard. gooshter? four women and a couple of men then circled him trying desperately to leap over the code of languages between them. his obsession with vetch had puzzled them. he had gone at one point into the centre of the city, bought some, and returned to the macedonians to show them what he needed. the following week, a store owner had waved it to him as he came down eastern avenue. vetch was fee-ee. but now they were onto serious things. a living creature, a gooshter, had been translated. he was surrounded. they were trying to discover how many he had. was raising them one of his professions? they knew where he lived, of course, had seen his yellow light looking down on wyatt avenue, knew he was alone, knew down to the very can of peaches what he ate in a week. peaches on friday. they had sent someone to find emil, who spoke the best english, and when the boy arrived he said, "peaches on friday, right?" patrick felt ashamed they could discover so little about him. he had reduced himself almost to nothing. he would walk home at dusk after working in the lake tunnel. his radio was on past midnight. he did nothing else that he could think of. they approved of his finnish suit. po modata eleganten! which meant stylish! stylish! he was handed a macedonian cake. and suddenly patrick, surrounded by friendship, concern, was smiling, feeling the tears on his face falling towards his stern macedonian-style moustache. elena, the great elena who had sold him vetch for over a year, unpinned the white scarf around her neck and passed it to him. he looked up and saw the men and women who could not know why he wept now among these strangers who in the past had seemed to him like dark blinds on his street, their street, for he was their alien. and then he had to remember new names. suddenly formal, beginning with elena. the women shook his hand, the men embraced and kissed him, and each time he said patrick. patrick. patrick. knowing he must now remember every single person. and now, because it was noon, the king street russian mission brass band fifty yards down the road, they invited him to lunch which was set up on tables beside the stalls and crates. he was guest of honour. elena on one side of him, emil on the other, and a table of new friends. he was brought a plate of cabbage rolls – sarmi, elena said, and suddenly the awful sulphurous odour he hadsmelled for the last year since moving was explained. emil was describing the technique of soaking cabbage leaves in a solution of salt and water and a bit of vinegar and leaving it there for days. patrick ate everything that was put in front of him. during coffee, kosta, the owner of the ohrida lake restaurant, sent along a question to emil. emil asked two or three others first to see if this question was apt. then he turned to patrick. "what else can you do?" the table was silent. elena put her hand on his and sent a qualifier via emil. "it does not matter if you don't do anything." the others down the table nodded. - i used to be a searcher. i can work dynamite. emil's translation created an even greater silence. patrick could hear every note of the russian mission band down the street. then kosta jumped up and yelled something at patrick. his face looked at him with anger, full of passion. emil turned to patrick now, having to yell above the sudden din at the table. "he says 'me too, me too."' kosta grabbed a round loaf of bread, leapt free of the bench, and booted it down the road in the direction of the russian mission band. later that afternoon when patrick was showing the iguana to the street, the man kosta said, "the waterworks at eight, sunday night. a gathering. " then he drifted away, not allowing patrick to reply or question the invitation. an hour after dusk disappeared into the earth the people came in silence, in small and large families, up the slope towards the half-built waterworks. emerging from darkness, mothlike, walking towards the thin rectangle of the building's southern doorway. the movement was quickly over, the wave of bodies had seemed a shadow of a cloud over the slope. inside the building they moved in noise and light. it was an illegal gathering of various nationalities and the noise of machines camouflaged their activity from whoever might have been passing along queen street a hundred yards away. many languages were being spoken, and patrick followed the crowd to the seats that were set up around a temporary stage. he saw kosta, who was busy greeting and shepherding people, and he watched him until kosta caught his eye. patrick waved and kosta raised his hand and continued with what he was doing. patrick felt utterly alone in this laughing crowd that traded information back and forth, held children on their laps. the four-piece band was playing by the stage. it was a party and a political meeting, all of them trespassing, waiting now for speeches and entertainment. patrick found a seat and took a sip from his flask. almost immediately the electric lights were turned off, leaving only the glow from oil lamps on the edge of the platform. the puppets arrived on stage in a mob, their wooden bones clattering. the semicircle of oil lamps cast yellow onto this section of the pumping station – onto the generators, the first few rows of the audience, the mosaic tiles, and brass banisters. patrick looked up and saw the grid above them on the upper level, hardly visible, where the puppeteers must have been lying in darkness. the forty puppets moved into the light, their paws gesturing at the air. the males had moustaches and beards, the females had been given rouged faces. there was one life-sized puppet. this giant in their midstwas the central character in the story, its face brightly coloured: green-shadowed eyes and a raccoon ring of yellow around them so they were like targets. all of the puppets looked stunned. feet tested air before each exaggerated step was taken on this dangerous new country of the stage. their costumes were a blend of several nations. it was five minutes into the dance before patrick realized that the large puppet was human. and this was only because the dancer moved out of his puppet movements and began to twirl in gestures impossible for wood. the large figure began to distinguish itself from the others. it became a hero not by size but by gesture and the detail of character. perhaps it was an exceptional puppet of cloth as opposed to an exceptional human being. behind the curled moustache it was perturbed and nervous – ambitious, scared, at times greedy. it varied its emotions from fear to desire. the other puppets included a prune-faced rich woman, a policeman, the sly friend, the family matriarch. the hero linked them all. there was no noise, no drum-beat or song. just the clattering of their feet, just the wooden hands touching each other gently the way fingernails touch glass. the puppets ranged all over the stage or huddled together as a chorus, warning the hero of his ambition, gesturing him down with laws. the human puppet, alien and naive and gregarious, upset everything. the face, in spite of the moustache, was dark and young. he wore a finnish shirt and serbian pants. a plot grew. laughing like a fool he was brought before the authorities, unable to speak their language. he stood there assaulted by insults. his face was frozen. the others began to pummel him but not a word emerged – just a damaged gaze in the context of those flailing arms. he fell to the floor pleading with gestures. the scene was endless. patrick wanted to rip the painted face off. the caricature of a culture. his eyes could not move away from that face. the audience around him was silent. the only sounds on stage were grunts of authority. they were all waiting for the large puppet to speak, but it could say nothing. the thick eyebrows, the big nose, the curled moustache – all of which parodied them – became haunting. when the figure wheeled now the sweat on the pink brocade shirt made it blood-red along the spine and shoulders. it stamped a foot to try and bring out a language. the other puppets shifted like bamboo to the side of the stage. the figure knelt, one hand banging down on the wooden floor as if pleading for help – a terrible loudness entering the silent performance. the audience began to clap in unison with the banging hand, the high hall of the waterworks echoing. patrick was unable to move, his eyes locked upon the crouched figure, the manic hand. if it was not stopped it would burst. that was absurd. he wanted the hall to be quiet, the figure's terror stopped. he could see the yellow-ringed eyes, the shirt bloody from the darkness of sweat, the mask of the painted face looking up like a dog. patrick stood up and stumbled over feet until he reached the aisle. he wanted to be out of here, out of this building. he was covered in the heartbeat of applause which started to come faster. each footstep as he moved released the terrible noise. he was among members of the band, the silent band which sat there waiting for the next act when they would be required to play. he saw the huge instruments on their laps, which in their curls and convolutions looked like frozen organs of the body. he climbed up, slipping at first because he still couldn't remove his eyes from the face and the banging white hand. he stepped over a lamp. then he was up there on stage, and as soon as he approached the exhausted figure he saw up close that the performer was much smaller, that it was a woman. he knelt and held her by the shoulders, his arm on her damp back. he leaned forward, caught the hand stilltrying to smash down again like a machine locked in habit, a swimmer unable to stop. he swerved the palm away from the floor and brought it slowly down to her thigh. then he looked up, through the halo of light into the sudden silence. there was a crowd standing on the upper level as well. hundreds more than he had thought. he looked back at the woman, the costume made of false silk, a cheap glittering material from the streets, drenched in sweat. this close he could recognize nothing of the figure he had seen perform. it seemed washed out, exhausted statuary. one tear of sweat cut a path through the thick makeup. now the eyes, hidden in the circles of paint, focused on him, then reacted with shock. she bent forward. he felt his hand slide against the sweat of her cheek. he had forgotten where he was. she pulled herself up, her arm on his shoulder. she walked downstage slowly towards the kerosene lights, spreading her hands wide and then clapping them. a slow beat. there. there. there. then, with her arms out, the crowd cheering, she raised her swollen hand and now everyone was standing yelling at her. she brought her fingers to her lips and the audience became quiet. she threw the name of the next performer into their midst like a bell, and a man walked into the light carrying an umbrella. the crowd was immediately with him. patrick began to move backwards to the makeshift curtain. he looked down embarrassed and when he looked up again she had left the stage. backstage he would be an outsider. he recalled the touch of that hand on his shoulder as she pulled herself up. and the voice he had recognized. he tried to remember the washed-out face, its features under the makeup. behind the curtain there were just a few performers in half – light – one kerosene lamp on the floor. how should he enter a room where a giant takes off its head? where a dwarf stands up to full height. the macedonian juggler he had watched perform half an hour earlier with absolute abandon was packing the thirty hard oranges neatly into his suitcase. no sofas, or arches of light, just performers cleaning up. a man putting on his socks. someone reading the racing news. at the far end of the hall he saw an indian walking a puppet towards a corridor, as if escorting someone frail. patrick went after him. the man turned right along the venturi corridor and disappeared behind another curtain. here among the strangely shaped pipes and meters the air was humid. a great cheer went up from the audience. as the man came out patrick caught his arm and asked him where the puppet dancer was. the indian jerked his head towards the curtain and handed him a flashlight. he walked into pitch darkness. when he turned on the flashlight he saw swaying feet. he moved the light up the brocade robe – a king hung up there, the strings and wood handle attached to a pipe. three or four ceiling pipes held all of the puppets in mid-air. he swung the amber beam from side to side, and everywhere he turned, the light picked out faces and arms that no longer looked like puppets but relaxed humans, a shadow conference. it was a king's court, silent – a custom of the east. whenever the royal gong struck, the court of the moghul prince akbar remained frozen at whatever they were doing. it was the whim of a monarch during which time he moved among his retainers and subjects to study their dress and activity. movement meant execution. he walked into kitchens, armouries, bedrooms where lovers would lie frozen on the verge of touching, walked past dining-tables where the court sat hungry or bored looking at the cooling food, stepped into the quarters of falconers where only the birds moved and fussed on their perches.

so patrick moved in this darkness, the eye of the flashlight swallowing the colours, the room turning under his gaze like a jewel. what had been theatrical seemed locked within metamorphosis. he wanted to put his hand up and unbutton a blouse, remove a shoe. he moved quickly towards a figure but it was only a queen draped over a chair, sitting the way a queen would sit. he heard the cheers from the hall once more. patrick switched off the light and stood there. his eyes remembering scarlet, the puff of a blue sleeve, the flat brown feet pathetic as a peacock's under such grand costuming. a broken ochre hand. a splash. he turned to face the sound. he moved forward, one hand in front of him to hold away the costumed bodies, lifting his feet up high so he would not trip in the darkness. he thought, i am moving like a puppet. he touched an arm in the darkness not fully realizing it was human. a hand came from somewhere and held his wrist. "hello, patrick." he turned on the flashlight. she was waiting for the light, like a good actress, ready to be revealed. "no one is allowed here while i wash. i knew it had to be you. . . . " she was wearing a singlet and had been washing herself from a bowl, her hands now squeezing out a cloth in the basin and wiping her face, streaks of flesh across the paint. one line of colour remained that seemed to show her frowning. behind her a puppet slowly pivoted. he could smell the candle she must have blown out as soon as she heard him enter. "you can help with the paint on my neck. " patrick did not speak. the light moved down her arm to the bowl, illuminated her hand which wet the cloth, squeezed it, and moved forward to give it to him. she saw his right hand reach to take it from her. his hand began to wipe her neck. he removed the brown paint, turned her around and slowly wiped the vermilion frown-mark by her mouth, the light close on her face. he rinsed out the cloth again and holding her forehead steady wiped the targets off her eyes, cloth over one finger for precision, the blue left iris wavering at the closeness ... so that it was not alice gull but something more intimate – an eye muscle having to trust a fingertip to remove that quarter-inch of bright yellow around her sight. they were now many hours into the night. in her room on verral avenue. he had just seen the sleeping child. - i wasn't married, she said. her father is dead. he was like a comitidjiis.a chetnik. do you know what that means? he shook his head continuing to look out the window into the rain. he felt there was space in her small rooms only when he looked out. -open it, patrick. if it's raining the cat will want to come in. they are national guerrillas. political activists. freedom-fighters in bulgaria and turkey and serbia. they were tortured, then some of them came here. they have a very high level of justice. she smiled, then continued. -they are very difficult to live with.

-i think i have a passive sense of justice. -i've noticed. like water, you can be easily harnessed, patrick. that's dangerous. -i don't think so. i don't believe the language of politics, but i'll protect the friends i have. it's all i can handle. she sat on the mattress looking up at him, the cat purring in her lap as she dried it with a towel. -that's not enough, patrick. we're in a thunderstorm. -is that a line from one of your tracts? -no, it's a metaphor. you reach people through metaphor. it's what i reached you with earlier tonight in the performance. -you appealed to my sense of compassion. -compassion forgives too much. you could forgive the worst man. you forgive him and nothing changes. -you can teach him, make him aware ... -why leave the power in his hands? there was no reply from him. he turned away from her, back to the open window and the rain. -you believe in solitude, patrick, in retreat. you can afford to be romantic because you are self-sufficient. -yes, i've got about ten bucks to my name. -i'm not talking about money. working in the tunnels is terrible, i know that. but you have a choice, what of the others who don't? -such as. -such as this kid. such as three-quarters of the population of upper america. they can't afford your choices, your languor. - they could succeed. look at -come on, patrick, of course some make it. they do it by becoming just like the ones they want to overtake. like ambrose. look at what he became before he disappeared. he was predatory. he let nothing cling to him, not even clara. i always liked you because you knew that. because you hated that in him. -i hated him because i wanted what he had.

-i don't think so. you don't want power. you were born to be a younger brother. she stood up now and began pacing. she needed to move her arms, be more forceful. -anyway, we're not interested in ambrose anymore. to hell with him, he's damned. the power of the girl's father was still in her. patrick couldn't tell how much of a role it was. she spoke slowly now. -there is more compassion in my desire for truth than in your 'image' of compassion. you must name the enemy. -and if he is your friend? -i'm your friend. hana there sleeping is your friend. the people tonight in the audience were your friends. they're compassionate too. listen, they are terrible sentimentalists. they love your damn iguana. they'll cry all through their sister's wedding. they'll cry when their sister says she has had her first kiss. but they must turn and kill the animals in the slaughter-houses. and the smell of the tanning factories goes into their noses and lungs and stays there for life. they never get the smell off their bodies. do you know the smell? you can bet the rich don't know it. it brutalizes. it's like sleeping with the enemy. it clung to hana's father. they get skin burns from the galvanizing process. arthritis, rheumatism. that's the truth. -so what do you do? -you name the enemy and destroy their power. start with their luxuries – their select clubs, their summer mansions. alice stopped pacing, put a hand up to the low slope of the ceiling and pushed against it. - the grand cause, patrick. he knows he will never forget a word or a gesture of hers tonight, in this doll-house of a room. he sits on the bed looking up at the avid spirit of her. -someone always comes out of the audience to stop me, patrick. this time it was you. my old pal. -i don't think you will convert me. -yes. i can. -if it was valuable to some cause for me to kill someone would you want me to do it? she picked up the cat again. -would the girl's father have done that? -i don't think i'm big enough to put someone in a position where they have to hurt another.

it had stopped raining. they climbed out onto the fire escape, alice carrying the sleeping girl, the air free and light after the storm. she was smiling at the girl. he felt he was looking at another person. -hana is nine years old. already too smart. not enough a child, and that's sad. -you've got a lot more time with her. -no. i feel she's loaned to me. we're veiled in flesh. that's all. they looked out over the low houses of queen street, the metal of the fire escape wet around them, cool, a shock to their arms on this summer night. the rain had released the smells from the street and lifted them up. he lay back like the child, a raindrop now and then touching his shirt like a heartbeat. -i don't know, she whispered, near him. he reached to where she was and she put her hand against him. the sky looked mapped, gridded by the fire escape. above and below them a few neighbours came out onto the frail structures, laughing with relief at the cooler air. they would wave now and then, formally, to alice and her companion. he was suddenly aware that he had a role. a bottle of fruit whiskey on the end of a long piece of twine swung from side to side in front of them. alice caught it and pulled it in. "to impatience," she said. she drank, offered him some, and then holding the rope let the bottle down to another level. in this way it moved among the others. to the south they could see the lights of the victory flour mills. the macedonians, who disliked the raindrops on their hair, asked their wives to pass them their hats through the window, and felt more secure. they saw alice's man who worked in the tunnels. they sat among their families, looking towards the lake. the vista was upper america, a new world. landscape changed nothing but it brought rest, altered character as gradually as water on a stone. patrick lay back again beside alice and the girl hana. - you should sit up, she said after a while. you will see something beautiful. a rectangle of light went on below them. then another. the night-shift workers were starting to get up. they could be seen in grey trousers and undershirts, washing at their kitchen sinks. the neighbourhood was soon speckled with light while the rest of the city lay in sleep. soon they could hear doors closing on the street below them. figures filed out, macedonians and greeks, heading for the killing floors and railway yards and bakeries. -they don't want your revolution, patrick said to alice. -no. they won't be involved. just you. you're a mongrel, like me. not like my daughter here. but like me. -so what do you want? -nothing but thunder.

alice and hana were still on the fire escape, curled up together, when he left. he closed the door on them quiet as a thief. he would have to go back to his room, take his clothes out into the alley and beat the hardened mud out of them, then walk to work. it was about five a.m., his head and body buzzing, overloaded with false energy. later, he knew, he would be unable to lift his arms above his head, would stagger under the weight of a pickaxe. but for now the dawn in him, the sun, wakened his blood. he remembered clara in the paris hotel talking about how alice had been after the child's father had died. "hana wasn't born yet. but cato died and i think she went into madness, into something very alone. he was killed up north when she was pregnant." in the thompson grill, the counter radio was already playing songs about the heart, songs about women who let their men go as casually as a river through their fingers. the waitress with the tattoo gave him his coffee. the music this morning threw him across eras. he was eighteen again and he fell into a girl's arms, drunk and full of awe during his first formal dance, painted moonlight on the ceiling, the floating lights through the scrims that bathed the couples translating them. he had stepped up cocky and drunk onto the sprung floor and was suddenly close enough to see the girl's lost eyes, undisguised by the colours, and he too was lost. a chameleon among the minds of women. -what did you think of my friend? - i liked her. -she's a great actress. -better than you, is she? -by a hundred miles, patrick. -yes, l liked her. his mind skates across old conversations. the past drifts into the air like an oasis and he watches himself within it. the girl's eyes that night when he was eighteen were like tunnels into kindness and lust and determination which he loved as much as her white stomach and her ochre face. he saw something there he would never fully reach – the way clara dissolved and suddenly disappeared from him, or the way alice came to him it seemed in a series of masks or painted faces, both of these women like the sea through a foreground of men. these were days that really belonged to the moon. he was restless and full of alice gull. when the tunnel at the waterworks was completed, patrick got a jobat wickett and craig's tannery. his flesh tightened in this new dry world, his damp stiffness fell away. all day he thought of her as he cut skins in the cypress street leather factory. jobs were still scarce and it was only through alice's friends that he was hired. patrick's shoulder nudged the bolster that released rolls of leather onto the floor and he waded into the brown skins with the pilot knife, slicing the hides in straight lines. when his line was finished he would stand breathing in the cold air till someone else came off the cutter's alley. he was no longer aware of the smell from the dyers' yards. only if it rained would the odour assault his body. he was one of three pilot men. their knives weaved with the stride of their arms and they worked barefoot as if walking up a muddy river, slicing it up into tributaries. it was a skill that insisted on every part of the body's balance. alice would smell the leather on him, even after he had bathed in the courtyards when work was over, the brief pelt of water and steam on the row of them standing on the cobblestones. they were allowed only ten seconds of water. the men who dyed the leather got longer but the smell on them was terrible and it never left. dye work took place in the courtyards next to the warehouse. circular pools had been cut into the stone – into which the men leapt waist-deep within the reds and ochres and greens, leapt in embracing the skins of recently slaughtered animals. in the round wells four-foot in diameter they heaved and stomped, ensuring the dye went solidly into the pores of the skin that had been part of a live animal the previous day. and the men stepped out in colours up to their necks, pulling wet hides out after them so it appeared they had removed the skin from their own bodies. they had leapt into different colours as if into different countries. what the dyers wanted, standing there together, the representatives from separate nations, was a cigarette. to stand during the five-minute break dressed in green talking to a man in yellow, and smoke. to take in the fresh energy of smoke and swallow it deep into their lungs, roll it around and breathe it up so it would remove with luck the acrid texture already deep within them, stuck within every corner of their flesh. a cigarette, a star beam through their flesh, would have been enough to purify them. that is how patrick would remember them later. their bodies standing there tired, only the heads white. if he were an artist he would have painted them but that was false celebration. what did it mean in the end to look aesthetically plumaged on this october day in the east end of the city five hundred yards from front street? what would the painting tell? that they were twenty to thirty-five years old, were macedonians mostly, though there were a few poles and lithuanians. that on average they had three or four sentences of english, that they had never read the mail and empire or saturday night. that during the day they ate standing up. that they had consumed the most evil smell in history, they were consuming it now, flesh death, which lies in the vacuum between flesh and skin, and even if they never stepped into this pit again – a year from now they would burp up that odour. that they would die of consumption and at present they did not know it. that in winter this picturesque yard of colour was even more beautiful, the thin layer of snowfall between the steaming wells. below-zero weather and the almost naked men descend into the vats at the same whistle and cover themselves later with burlap as they stand waiting. the only virtue to winter was the removal of smell. they did not want a cigarette then, they could hardly breathe. their mouths sent forth plumes. they stood there, the steam coming through the burlap. and whenthey stopped steaming they knew they were too cold and had to go in. but during october, as patrick watched them during his break from the hide-room, they desired a cigarette. and they could never smoke – the acid of the solutions they had stepped into and out of so strong that they would have ignited if a flame touched them. a green man on fire. they were the dyers. they were paid one dollar a day. nobody could last in that job more than six months and only the desperate took it. there were other jobs such as water boys and hide-room labourers. in the open cloisters were the sausage and fertilizer makers. here the men stood, ankle-deep in salt, filling casings, squeezing out shit and waste from animal intestines. in the further halls were the killing-floors where you moved among the bellowing cattle stunning them towards death with sledge hammers, the dead eyes still flickering while their skins were removed. there was never enough ventilation, and the coarse salt, like the acids in the dyeing section, left the men invisibly with tuberculosis and arthritis and rheumatism. all of these professions arrived in morning darkness and worked till six in the evening, the labour agent giving them all english names. charlie johnson, nick parker. they remembered the strange foreign syllables like a number. for the dyers the one moment of superiority came in the showers at the end of the day. they stood under the hot pipes, not noticeably changing for two or three minutes – as if, like an actress unable to return to the real world from a role, they would be forever contained in that livid colour, only their brains free of it. and then the blue suddenly dropped off, the colour disrobed itself from the body, fell in one piece to their ankles, and they stepped out, in the erotica of being made free. what remained in the dyers' skin was the odour that no woman in bed would ever lean towards: alice lay beside patrick's exhausted body, her tongue on his neck, recognizing the taste of him, knowing the dyers' wives would never taste or smell their husbands again in such a way; even if they removed all pigment and coarse salt crystal, the men would smell still of the angel they wrestled with in the well, in the pit. incarnadine. "i'll tell you about the rich," alice would say. "the rich are always laughing. they keep saying the same things on their boats and lawns: isn't this grand! we're having a good time! and whenever the rich get drunk and maudlin about humanity you have to listen for hours. but they keep you in the tunnels and stockyards. they do not toil or spin. remember that ... understand what they will always refuse to let go of. there are a hundred fences and lawns between the rich and you. you've got to know these things, patrick, before you ever go near them – the way a dog before battling with cows rolls in the shit of the enemy." in kosta's house he relaxes as alice speaks with her friends, slipping out of english and into finnish or macedonian. she knows she can be unconcerned with his lack of language, that he is happy. she converses with full energy in this theatre of the dinner table, her face vivid; a scar, a mole will exaggerate when not disguised by the content of conversation. he in fact pleasures in his own descant interpretations of what is being said. he catches only the names of streets, the name of police chief draper, who has imposed laws against public meetings by foreigners. so if they speak this way in public, in any language other than english, they will be jailed. a rule of the city. the broncos will have them arrested as many already have been in various rallies in high park or in the shapiro drug store clash with the mounties in the previousyear. he watches each of her friends and he gazes at the small memory painting of europe on the wall – the spare landscape, the village imposed on it. he is immensely comfortable in this room. he remembers his father once passing the foreign loggers on first lake road and saying, "they don't know where they are." and now, in this neighbourhood intricate with history and ceremony, patrick smiles to himself at the irony of reversals. before the meal, kosta's wife had come up to him, pointed to one of the pictures and named her village, then she had pressed the side of her stomach with both hands sensually to make clear to patrick that she would be serving liver. if only it were possible that in the instance something was written down – idea or emotion or musical phrase – it became known to others of the era. the rejected carmen of 1875 turning so many into lovers of opera. and verdi in the pouring rain believing he was being turned into a frog – even this emotion realized by his contemporaries. patrick listens now as alice reads to him from the letters of joseph conrad – an extract which she has copied. she has already asked him who he likes to read and he has mentioned conrad. "yes, but," she says rising as the child cries, "have you read his letters?" in the other room she comforts the girl hana out of a nightmare. "wait," she continues, "i've got something to show you." very excited now, as if she fears he will get up and leave before she can present this gift. she too likes conrad. she likes his theatrical style. there are some novelists whose work actors love but who could not write a simple scene for the stage. they write the scenes actors dream, and conrad was that for alice. -listen: "an idle and selfish class loves to see mischief being made, even if it is made at its own expense. " -ha, he laughs. -he's complaining about tory views on spanish liberal insurgents of the 1830s, based in london. "of course i do not defend political crimes. it is repulsive to me by tradition, by sentiment, and even by reflection. but some of these men struggled for an idea, openly, in the light of day, and sacrificed to it all that to most men makes life worth living. moreover a sweeping assertion is always wrong, since men are infinitely varied; and harsh words are useless because they cannot combat ideas. and the ideas (that live) should be combatted, not the men who die. " it was a letter conrad had written to a newspaper. so patrick listened to his contemporary. -how can i convert you? she would ask in the darkness of the bedroom. -the trouble with ideology, alice, is that it hates the private. you must make it human. -these are my favourite lines. i'll whisper them. "i have taught you that the sky in all its zones is mortal.... let me now re-emphasize the extreme looseness of the structure of all objects."-say it again. in the darkness he can see just the faint aura of her hair. *** on saturday afternoons the dye washers and cutters, men from the killing beds, the sausage makers, the electrocuters – all of them from this abattoir and tannery on cypress street – were free. after bathing under the pipes they walked up bathurst street to queen, the thirty or so of them knowing little more than each other's false names or true countries. hey italy! they were in pairs or trios, each in their own language as the dyers had been in their own colours. after a beer they would continue up bathurst to the oak leaf steam baths. paying their quarters they were each handed a towel, a sheet, a padlock, and a canvas bag. they stripped, packed their clothes and salaries into the bag, locked it, and strung the keys around their necks. there was a sense of relaxation among all of them. hey canada! a wave to patrick. it was saturday. in the whitewashed rooms they sat naked within the steam, brushing a scab, considering a scar on the shoulder. someone he had never spoken to caught his eye and both of them were so tired they could not turn away their gaze, just watched the other bluntly. he knew nothing about the men around him except how they moved and laughed – on this side of language. he himself had kept his true name and voice from the bosses at the leather yard, never spoke to them or answered them. a chain was pulled that forced wet steam into the room so that their bodies were separated by whiteness coming up through the gridded floors, tattoos and hard muscles fading into unborn photographs. they shifted, stood up, someone began to sing. the wet heat focused the exhaustion and under the cold shower the last of the tension fell to his feet. for the last hour they lay on the green bunks, a radio on the windowsill transmitting the saturday afternoon opera, with a sign above it in three languages insisting that no one change the station. he lay there, not wanting translation, letting the emotion of the music fall onto him. soon this arm would become the arm alice kissed. they were all being released from the week's work and began to allow themselves ease, the clarified world of passion. the music of la boheme, the death of mimi, hovering over their unprotected bodies, the keys hanging from the cords around their necks. *** then it was her hand in the doorway touching his heart, against his ribs, aware through her fingers of his weariness. in the small room where he could take three steps and touch the window. there was patrick and alice and hana. if it was warm they would eat on the fire escape. or if alice was working he and hana walked over to the balkan cafe where they sat on wire chairs and were served by long-aproned waiters. they ordered bop and mania, hana telling him in her clear, exact voice what the names meant. bop was beans. mania was stew. as he watched hana, her face drifted into alice's and back again as if two glass negatives merged, then moved apart. it was not so much the features as the mannerisms of alice that he witnessed in her daughter. he was at ease with the precise hana and the way she seriously articulated herself among strangers. thatvoice knew what it wanted and knew what it was allowed. he wanted to pick hana up and embrace her on the street but felt shy, though in games or in a crowded streetcar her arm lay across him as if needing his warmth and closeness. as he did hers. but his relationship with alice had a horizon. she refused to speak of the past. even her stories about hana's father, though intricate, gave nothing away of herself. she was never self-centred in her mythologies. she would turn any compliment away. her habit of sitting pale and naked at the breakfast table, cutting up whatever fruit they had into three portions, or sitting down with fried eggs made him once whisper to her that she was beautiful. "i'm terrific over eggs," she shot back, her mouth full. she did not get dressed. she planned to go back to bed as soon as patrick left for the tannery and hana left for school. alice worked in the evenings. his relationship with hana was clearer. there would always be something careful about her. as if she had been badly scalded and so would approach all water tentatively for fear it was boiling. with her there would be brief conflicts, a discussion, and then everything was settled. she would not be bossed and she was self-sufficient. she didn't expect forgiveness. they sat at the round tables at the balkan cafe eating a large meal and with ice creams strolled over at ten to the parrot theatre to pick up alice. they had all the time in the world, hana translating the information she received on the street, speaking to a butcher who walked beside them for a hundred yards carrying a pig's head. patrick watched the gestures towards him. they knew who he was now. a hat raised off a head in slow motion, a woman's nod to his left shoulder. he lived – in his job and during these evening walks – in a silence, with noise and conversation all around him. to be understood, his reactions had to exaggerate themselves. the family idiot. a stroke victim. "paderick," the shopkeepers would call him as he handed them money and a list of foods hana had written out in macedonian, accepting whatever they gave him. he felt himself expand into an innocent. every true thing he learned about character he learned at this time in his life. once, when they were at the teck cinema watching a chaplin film he found himself laughing out loud, joining the others in their laughter. and he caught someone's eye, the body bending forward to look at him, who had the same realization – that this mutual laughter was conversation. he was always comfortable in someone else's landscape, enjoyed being taught the customs of a place. patrick wanted the city hana had constructed for herself – the places she brought together and held as if on the delicate thread of her curiosity: hoo's trading company where alice bought herbs for fever, gas lit diners whose aquarium windows leaned against the street. they watched the water-nymph follies at sunnyside park, watched the italian gymnasts at the elm street gym, heard the chanting of english lessons to large groups at central neighbourhood house – one pure english voice claiming my name is ernest, and then a barrage of male voices claiming their names were ernest. but hana's favourite place of spells was the geranium bakery, and one saturday afternoon she took him there to meet her friend nicholas. she guided patrick among the other workers and sacks of flour and rollers towards nicholas temelcoff, who turned towards her and stretched his arms out wide. it was a joke, he was covered in flour and did not really expect to be embraced. he shook patrick's hand and began to show themaround the bakery, hana scooping bits of raw dough with her finger and eating them. temelcoff was meticulously dressed in jacket and tie but wore no apron so that the flour dust continued to settle on him as he moved through the bakery. he pulled chains that hung from the ceiling to start rollers moving on the upper level. he brought a small doll out of his pocket and handed it to hana – and this time she embraced him, her head on his chest. the two men had said no more than four polite sentences to each other by the time patrick left with the girl. one night hana pulled out a valise from under the bed and showed him some mementoes. there was a photograph of her as a baby – with her first nickname, piko, scrawled in pencil on it. three other photographs: a group of men working on the bloor street viaduct, a photograph of alice in a play at the finnish labour temple, three men standing in snow in a lumber camp. a sumac bracelet. a rosary. these objects spread out on the bed replaced her father's absence. so he discovered cato through the daughter. the girl had been told everything about him, told of his charm, his cruelty, his selfishness, his heroism, the way he had met and seduced alice. "you didn't know cato, did you?" "no." "well he was supposed to be very passionate, very cruel. " "don't talk like that, hana, you're ten years old, and he's your father." "oh, i love him, even if i never met him. that's just the truth. " she was totally unlike patrick, always practical. when he returned from the steambaths on the first saturday she had inquired about the price and he saw her trying to work out if it was worth it. "i would have paid anything," he muttered, and he saw she could not understand or accept such extravagance in him. she thought him foolish. in the same way, her portrait of her father lacked any sentimentality. -who were those people in the bridge picture, hana? -oh she must have known them. *** alice was in sunlight on the grass slope leading down from the waterworks, looking out onto the lake, her hand keeping the sun out of her eyes. "i had to learn i couldn't trust him. not that he ever wanted me to. you must realize that cato was not his real name, it was his war name. and who knows who he was with or what he was doing on a wednesday or a friday. he was self-made. he worked hard, he spoke out. on thursdays he came shimmering along on his bike, dropped his tackle in the hall as if he were a hurried fisherman, and said, let's go!" -how long did you stay together? -till he died. we were always breaking up. he thought his life was too complicated. we spent half our time worrying with each other about this. and then on wednesday nights i would dream out the next afternoon on our bicycles along that stretch of road, in april flood or summer dust. you could blindfold me now, patrick, and i would be able to take you there, fifty yards off the road, across a creek – lots of mud here, turn right – this is where we always got our feet wet, some gum off a low pine on my hair as i'd leap the creek. shoulder-high cattails and ferns, then into the longhouse of cedars. spring crows in the cedar branches! needles on theearth half a foot deep! when we made love there he would bury something, a small bottle, a pencil, a handkerchief, a sock. he left something everywhere we made love. such sexual archaeology. there was a piece of wood that looked like the roof of a doghouse. when we got lost we'd always have to look for that when snow changed the shape of trees or fall made skeletons of everything, or in summer when everything was overgrown chaos. we would go there all through the year, every season, and winter was strangely easier than summer with its bugs and deer flies. we could make hollows in the snow, we were protected from wind by the trees. it is important to be close to the surface of the earth. he began to like it, i think, us not being lovers indoors. still, we always fought. i told him once if he ever broke up with me and said we were 'crazy' and that we had to stop, i would knife him. -you told me that too. -i feel charmed, patrick, that i knew him as well as i know you. -i feel jealous. no. i don't feel jealous. -because he's dead? you listen to me so calmly, all this intimacy.... -hana showed me the pictures. who were the men on the bridge? -that's the past, patrick, leave it alone. anyway, you should get hana to talk to you about cato and the socks. that's her favourite story. "they were in the woods and came into a field to get away from the bugs. it was summer. lots of bugs, my mom said. so they took off their clothes and went for a swim in the river. when they came back, there were all these young bulls where their clothes were. about five of them in a circle around the clothes. only they were not interested in the clothes except for his socks! they were sniffing them up in the air and tossing them back and forth. it really embarrassed cato. my mom told me he didn't want to talk about it to others. i just love that – all those serious bulls throwing his socks back and forth. mom thinks they were very excited. " patrick had the photograph from hana's suitcase in his pocket. in books he had read, even those romances he swallowed during childhood, patrick never believed that characters lived only on the page. they altered when the author's eye was somewhere else. outside the plot there was a great darkness, but there would of course be daylight elsewhere on earth. each character had his own time zone, his own lamp, otherwise they were just men from nowhere. he was in the riverdale library looking for any reference to the building of the bloor street viaduct. he collected the newspapers and journals he needed and went and sat in the boys and girls room with its high rafters and leaded windows that let in oceans of light. he revelled in this room, the tiny desks, the smell of books. it was how he imagined the dining hall of a submarine would look. he read the descriptions of the bridge's opening on october 18, 1918. one newspaper had a picture of a cyclist racing across. he worked backwards. it had taken only two years to build. it had taken years before that to agree on how it was to be done, commissioner harris' determination forcing it through. he looked atthe various photographs: the shells of wood structures into which concrete was poured, and then the wood removed like hardened bandages to reveal the piers. he read up on everything – survey arguments, the scandals, the deaths of workers fleetingly mentioned, the story of the young nun who had fallen off the bridge, the body never found. he read about the flooding don river underneath, ice dangers, the decision to use night crews and the night deaths that followed. there was an article on daredevils. he heard the library bell. he turned the page to the photograph of them and he pulled out the picture he had and laid it next to the one in the newspaper. third from the left, the newspaper said, was nicholas temelcoff. leaving the library, patrick crossed broadview avenue and began walking east. he paused, suddenly stilled, wanting to go back, but the library was closed now and it would be pointless. they would not print the photograph of a nun. a dead or a missing nun. he took a step forward. now he was walking slowly, approaching a street-band, and the click of his footsteps unconsciously adapted themselves to the music that began to surround him. the cornet and saxophone and drum chased each other across solos and then suddenly, as patrick drew alongside them, fell together and rose within a chorus. he saw himself gazing at so many stories – knowing of alice's lover cato and hana's wanderings in the baker's world. he walked on beyond the sound of the street musicians, aware once again of the silence between his individual steps, knowing now he could add music by simply providing the thread of a hum. he saw the interactions, saw how each one of them was carried by the strength of something more than themselves. if alice had been a nun ... the street-band had depicted perfect company, with an ending full of embraces after the solos had made everyone stronger, more delineated. his own life was no longer a single story but part of a mural, which was a falling together of accomplices. patrick saw a wondrous night web – all of these fragments of a human order, something ungoverned by the family he was born into or the headlines of the day. a nun on a bridge, a daredevil who was unable to sleep without drink, a boy watching a fire from his bed at night, an actress who ran away with a millionaire – the detritus and chaos of the age was realigned. *** the articles and illustrations he found in the riverdale library depicted every detail about the soil, the wood, the weight of concrete, everything but information on those who actually built the bridge. there were no photographers like lewis hine, who in the united states was photographing child labour everywhere – trapper boys in coal mines, seven-year-old doffer girls in new england mills. to locate the evils and find the hidden purity. official histories and news stories were always soft as rhetoric, like that of a politician making a speech after a bridge is built, a man who does not even cut the grass on his own lawn. hine's photographs betray official history and put together another family. the man with the pneumatic drill on the empire state building in the fog of stone dust, a tenement couple, breaker boys in the mines. his photographs are rooms one can step into – cavernous buildings where a man turns a wrench the size of his body, or caves of iron where the white faces give the young children working there the terrible look of ghosts. but patrick wouldnever see the great photographs of hine, as he would never read the letters of joseph conrad. official histories, news stories surround us daily, but the events of art reach us too late, travel languorously like messages in a bottle. only the best art can order the chaotic tumble of events. only the best can realign chaos to suggest both the chaos and order it will become. within two years of 1066, work began on the bayeux tapestry, constantin the african brought greek medicine to the western world. the chaos and tumble of events. the first sentence of every novel should be: "trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human." meander if you want to get to town. *** i have taught you that the sky in all its zones is mortal. her favourite sentence hovers next to patrick as he wakens. by dawn he is on the livid floor of the tannery with the curved pilot knife. all day long as he cuts into the leather his mind moves over the few details she has given him about her life. even in the farmhouse at paris plains there had been a silence about her youth, even with cato she gave out only his war name. if alice gull had been a nun? a rosary, a sumac bracelet. . . at six in the evening he returns from work and her open palms press into his ribs. he lifts alice into his arms and hana jumps onto her mother's back. so they move, cumbersome, through the small room, falling onto the bed. the game is that hana has to try and push them off, putting her feet against the wall and her shoulders against them. then they are on the floor and hana falls on top. then he and hana try to lift alice back onto the bed. he is always surprised at alice's body. she seems physically frail, as if a jostle will break her, but she is agile, a dancer as much as an actress moving fluidly through rooms. she thinks the twentieth century's greatest invention is the jitterbug. she can almost forgive capitalism for that. she is in love with fats waller. patrick has seen her sit at the piano in the balkan cafe and sing "needed no star wanted no moon always thought it too dumb ... then all at once up jumped you with love." clara, she would say later, was the classical one, she could play the piano like a queen stepping across mud. i play the way i think. and heartbreaking romance is all i want in music. but alice's tenderest speech to him, as she sat on his belly looking down, concerned her missing of clara. "ilove clara," she said to him, the lover of clara. "i miss her. she made me sane for all those years. that was important for what i am now. " she could move like ... she could sing as low as ... why is it that i am now trying to uncover every facet of alice's nature for myself? he wants everything of alice to be with him here in this room as if she is not dead. as if he can be given that gift, to relive those days when alice was with him and hana, which in literature is the real gift. he turns the page backwards. once more there is the image of them struggling and tickling alice until she releases her grip on her shirt and it comes off with a flourish, and hana jumps up, waving it like a rebel's flag in the small green-painted room. all these fragments of memory ... so we can retreat from the grand story and stumble accidentally upon a luxury, one of those underground pools where we can sit still. those moments, those few pages in a book we go back and forth over. *** nicholas temelcoff's fingers sink into a ball of dough and pull it apart, then they reassemble it and fling it down onto the table. he looks up and sees patrick enter the geranium bakery, awkwardly look around, and then approach him. patrick pulls out the photograph and places it in front of temelcoff. behind them the pulleys and rollers move hundreds of loaves into the ovens, pause, then continue out. temelcoff in his grey clothes talks with patrick about the bridge and the nun – reminded of the exact date which his memory had lost – and pleasure and wonder fill him. he stands in the centre of the bakery thinking, throwing a small ball of dough up and catching it, unaware of this gesture for so long that patrick, a yard from him, cannot reach him. temelcoff is somewhere else, the eyes magnified behind the spectacles, the ball of dough falling surely back into the hand, the arm that caught her in the air and pulled her back into life. "talk, you must talk," and so mockingly she took a parrot's name. alicia. nicholas temelcoff never looks back. he will drive the bakery van over the bridge with his wife and children and only casually mention his work there. he is a citizen here, in the present, successful with his own bakery. his bread and rolls and cakes and pastries reach the multitudes in the city. he is a man who is comfortable among ovens, the smell of things rising, the metamorphosis of food. but he pauses now, reminded about the details of the incident on the bridge. he stands exactly where patrick left him, thinking, as those would who believe that to continue a good dream you must lie down the next night in exactly the same position you awakened in, where the body parted from its images. nicholas is aware of himself standing there within the pleasure of recall. it is something new to him. this is what history means. he came to this country like a torch on fire and he swallowed air as he walked forward and he gave out light. energy poured through him. that was all he had time for in those years. language, customs, family, salaries. patrick's gift, that arrow into the past, shows him the wealth in himself, how he has been sewn into history. now he will begin to tell stories. he is a tentative man, even with his family. that night in bed shyly he tells his wife the story of the nun. cato would always arrive late, alice remembers, his bicycle clanging to the pavement outside her window.

she would climb onto the handlebars and they'd weave down to the lake laid out like crinoline. they'd lie against the railway embankment a few yards from lake ontario. the branches in winter were encased in ice and she would lean her head back, exposing her white neck, and take twig and icicle in her mouth and snap it off with the pressure of her tongue. but at other times she was glad she didn't live with him permanently, to be pulled continually by his planet. if you were close to cato you had to be a representative of his world, his friends, his plans for the week. strangers, old lovers, ambled up to him on the street and embraced him and they had to join the group. it was impossible to go two blocks on a bicycle with him without running into someone who needed help to find a friend or move a cabinet. "just one day, cato," she'd say. "even four hours!" and so he became the man who was thursday to her. they disappeared into the ravines, the woods north of the city, or her favourite place – against the thick stones of the railway embankment, the willow bending over clothed in ice, loving each other along with the sound of the spring breakup. kissing each other with stones in their mouths. the freeze still over the march lake, she would lie on her stomach, his hand under her, the shudder of the passing train, the apalachicola boxcars, reaching through his palm to her breast. so thursday jumped out of the week like a fold-out bed. but there were no beds for them ever. by the time hana was born he was dead. patrick laid his head on her stomach, watching the secret lift of her skin at each heartbeat. talking on the nights they could afford to stay up late. "he was born up north, you know, quite near where he died." her hand brushed against his chest. "his father moved here from finland as a logger. here his family no longer had to bow to priests or dignitaries and they were soon involved in the unions. cato was born here. his father skated three miles for the doctor the night he was born. he skated across the lake holding up cattails on fire." patrick stopped her hand moving. -so they were finns. -what? -finns. when i was a kid ... now in his thirties he finally had a name for that group of men he witnessed as a child. she looked at patrick, who was smiling as if a riddle old and tiresome had been solved, a burr plucked from his brain. in the green room the moon showed her face clearly. a moon returning from when he was eleven. he loved the power of coincidence, the pleasure of strangeness. hello finland! - come into me. and who was she? and where was she from? his hands on her shoulders, his arms straight, so their upper torsos were separate, their faces apart. the brain and eyes interpreting pleasure in the other, these texturesthat brushed and gripped. he pivoted on her hands against his belly, moving deeper, moving back, and was still. not a movement of the eye. he knew now he was the sum of all he had been in his life since he was that boy in the snow woods, her hands collapsing to hold him against her harder. fingernail at his spine. his cheek against her turquoise eye. he lay in bed looking at the light of the moon in the bones of the fire escape. the light of the electric clock advertising cabinet cigars. out there the beautiful grey of the victory flour mills at midnight, its clean curves over the lake. any decade you wished. - god i love your face ... she has delivered him out of nothing. this woman who jumps onto him laughing in mid-air and growls at his neck and pulls him like a wheel over her. how can she who had torn his heart open at the waterworks with her art lie now like a human in his arms? or stand catatonic in front of bananas on eastern avenue deciding which bunch to buy? does this make her more magical? as if a fabulous heron in flight has fallen dead at his feet and he sees the further wonder of its meticulous construction. how did someone conceive of putting this structure of bones and feathers together, deciding on the weight of beak and skull, and give it the ability to fly? his love of the theatre was that of an amateur. he picked up gossip, mementoes, handbills. he loved technique, to walk backstage and see ophelia with her mad face half rubbed off. this was humanity in theatre, the scar – the old actor famous for playing whimsical judges, who rode the queen streetcar east of the city and ate his dinner alone before joining his sleeping wife. patrick liked that. he wanted to be fooled by the person he felt could not fool him, who stopped three yards past the side curtain and became somebody else. but with alice, after the episode at the waterworks and in other performances, he can never conceive how she leaps from her true self to her other true self. it is a flight he knows nothing about. he cannot put the two people together. did the actor – holding her on stage, reciting wondrous language, holding his painted face inches away from her painted face, kissing her ear in drawing-room comedies – know the person she had stepped from to be there? in the midst of his love for alice, in the midst of lovemaking even, he watches her face waiting for her to be translated into this war bride or that queen or shop girl, half expecting metamorphosis as they kiss. annunciation. the eye would go first, and as he draws back he will be in another country, another century, his arms around a stranger. there had been an earring missing beside the bed or at the sink in the kitchen. he had watched her move around the room half-naked, dressing, bending down to a pile of clothes in his room without furniture, a long time ago, saying can't find my earring, does it matter? as if another woman would find it. alice departing with one ear undressed. if we meet again we can say hello, we can say goodbye. dear alice –the only heat in this bunkhouse is from a small drum stove. in the evenings air is thick from the damp clothes in the rafters above the fire and from tobacco smoke. to avoid suffocating, the men in the upper bunks push out the moss chinking between logs. patrick reads slowly, knowing he will be given the letter only once, on this summer night under the one lightbulb of the room, far from winter weather. hana sits on the bed and watches him. for what? he thinks as he reads what his face should express to the letter-writer's daughter. he holds the grade-school notebook which the words fill. she has removed it from the suitcase and presented it to him. dear alice, scrawled, the handwriting large and hurried but the information detailed as if cato were trying to hold everything he saw, at the lumber camp near onion lake, during his final days. i write at a table hammered permanently into the floor. the log bunks are nailed into the walls. fires die out at night and men wake with hair frozen to damp icicles on the wall. "in the bleak mid-winter – frosty wind made moan – earth stood hard as iron – water like a stone." that was the first hymn i learned in english, written by someone in an english village. and it describes this place better than anything else. patrick sees cato writing by tallow light ... sealing the letter, passing the package to someone leaving the camp the next morning. when alice opens the package five weeks later she pulls the exercise book to her face and smells whatever she can of him, for he has been dead a month. she smells the candlewax, she imagines the odour of the hut, the cold pencil he has sharpened before beginning to write his unsigned letters about camp conditions and strike conditions. cato sits dead centre, at the food table, the pipe smoke moves live and grey around him. his hair smells of it, it has entered deep into his shirt and sweater, it hangs against his stubbled beard. none of the camp bosses knows who he is or of his connection to the planned strike. but they soon discover this. he slips out of the lumber camp on foot and goes into open snow country. the nearest town is port arthur, over a hundred and twenty miles away, and he aims himself towards it. four men on horseback attempt to capture cato over the next week. but cato knows snow country; he was born into it. he can, it seems, disappear under the surface of it. he avoids the familiar route, sleeps in trees, even risks crawling on all fours over thin-iced lakes – hearing the surface crack and groan under him. now and then he sees flares belonging to his hunters. at each camp he writes into a notebook, jams it into a tin, and buries the tin deep under the snow or ties it onto a high branch. meanwhile his package of letters is travelling, passed from hand to hand before it nestles in a bag next to a rolled-up swede saw on a logger's back on the final leg of the journey. while he is cutting a hole in the ice at onion lake, cato sees the men. they ride out of the trees and execute him. they find no messages or identification on him. they try burning the body but he will not ignite. there have been union men before him and there will be union men after him. the man with the swede saw posts his bundle of letters in algoma unaware that the sender is dead, shot to death, buried in the ice of a shallow river. they lose two days a month because of wet weather. travelling eats up $10 a season; mitts $6; shoes and stockings $ 25; working clothes $35. being forced to buy their supplies in camps means 30 per cent taggedonto city prices ... patrick reads, aware that the smell of smoke is no longer on the porous paper. the words on the page form a rune – flint-hard and unemotional in the midst of the inferno of cato's situation. and who is he to touch the lover of this man, to eat meals with his daughter, to stand dazed under a lightbulb and read his last letter? he remains standing alone in the room hana has now left. she had seen him hypnotized, as if the letter stared back at him. he realizes what he is doing, that he has become a searcher again with this family. as if he had leaned forward to the woman he had just met in paris plains and said, who is your lover? tell me the most painful thing that has happened to you. for he has over the years learned the answers. he holds now the last ten minutes of cato's language. in his mind he sees alice pick up the package which death has made impossible – after the murder, the discovery of the body in ice, his burial, and the acquittal of the bosses at the inquiry. patrick has clung like moss to strangers, to the nooks and fissures of their situations. he has always been alien, the third person in the picture. he is the one born in this country who knows nothing of the place. the finns of his childhood used the river, even knew it by night, the men of burning rushes delirious in the darkness. this he had never done. he was a watcher, a corrector. he could no more have skated along the darkness of a river than been the hero of one of these stories. alice had once described a play to him in which several actresses shared the role of the heroine. after half an hour the powerful matriarch removed her large coat from which animal pelts dangled and she passed it, along with her strength, to one of the minor characters. in this way even a silent daughter could put on the cloak and be able to break through her chrysalis into language. each person had their moment when they assumed the skins of wild animals, when they took responsibility for the story. clara and ambrose and alice and temelcoff and cato – this cluster made up a drama without him. and he himself was nothing but a prism that refracted their lives. he searched out things, he collected things. he was an abashed man, an inheritance from his father. born in abashed, ontario. what did the word mean? something that suggested there was a terrible horizon in him beyond which he couldn't leap. something hollow, so when alone, when not aligned with another – whether it was ambrose or clara or alice – he could hear the rattle within that suggested a space between him and community. a gap of love. he had lived in this country all of his life. but it was only now that he learned of the union battles up north where cato was murdered some time in the winter of 1921, and found under the ice of a shallow creek near onion lake a week after he had written his last letter. the facts of the story had surrounded hana since birth, it was a part of her. and all of his life patrick had been oblivious to it, a searcher gazing into the darkness of his own country, a blind man dressing the heroine. every sunday they still congregated at the waterworks. they walked over grills under which foam rushed, they opened doorways to waterfalls. the building, now three-quarters finished, spread ceremonial over the rise just south of queen street, looking onto the lake. because of its structure the main pumping station could be filled with lamps and no light would be betrayed to the outside world. the sound of pumpschurning drowned out the noise of their meetings. on sundays, as darkness fell, the various groups walked up to the building from the lakeshore where they would not be seen. there was food, entertainment, political speeches. a man who mimicked the king of england stepped forward with a monologue summarizing the news of the past week. numerous communities and nationalities spoke and performed in their own languages. when they finished, the halls were cleaned up, the floors swept. patrick and alice walked home along queen street. the girl was asleep in patrick's arms, so at some point, tired from her weight, they would sit on a bench and lay hana out, her head on alice's lap. he loved this part of the city, the evening streets an extension of his limbs. -i want to look after hana. -you already do. -more formally. if that will help. -she knows you love her. a july night. on what summer night was it that she spoke of clara and how she missed her? all these incidents and emotions to cover and the story like a tired child tugging us on, not letting us converse with ease, sleeping on our shoulder so it is difficult to embrace the person we love. he loved alice. he leaned against her and he could feel her hair still wet from the sweat of the performance. -you will catch a cold. -ah yes. *** now he aches for her smallness, her intricacy – he needs a second glance whenever he thinks of her. in the middle of a field she removes her blouse. sightings of her breasts. trompe l'oeil. an artist has picked up a pencil and made a fine crosshatched shadow and so they come into existence. he sits and watches her sniffing the wind across a field. the woman he looked through when in love with clara. clara's eclipse. the phrase like a flower or event named during the last century. during cato's funeral, while alice held the infant hana, there was an eclipse. the mourners stood still while the finnish brass band played chopin's "funeral march" into the oncoming darkness and throughout the seventeen minutes of total eclipse. the music a lifeline from one moment of light to another. now he aches for her, for those days that belonged to the moon. they would sit side by side in a chinese restaurant, empty but for the two of them. wanting to face each other but wanting to hold each other and having to decide on one pleasure. the intricate choices of desire.

i don't think i'm big enough to put someone in a position where they will hurt another. that's what you said, alice, that made me love you most. made me trust you. no one else would have worried about that, could have said it and made me believe it, that first night in your room. every bird and insect froze into the element of air at that moment when the sentence slid up, palpable, out of your mouth. you unaware you were expressing a tenderness, thinking you were being critical of yourself. and another gesture of yours at a dance. i was dancing with someone else and could see you, dying to dance, and stepping up to a man and delicately tapping him on his shoulder, a shy yet determined expression on your face. they sit in a field. they sit in the red and yellow and gold decor of the restaurant, empty in the late afternoon but for them. hunger and desire spiriting him across the city, onto trolley after trolley, in order to reach her arm, her neck, this chinese restaurant, that macedonian cafe, this field he is now in the centre of with her. there are country houses on the periphery so they have walked to its centre, the distant point, to be alone. he will turn while walking and see the fragility of her breasts – the result of a pencil's shading. she drops into his arms, held out stern as a school desk. he walks then, he dances with the wheat in his hands. when he was twelve he turned the pages always towards illustration and saw the heroes carry the women across british columbian streams, across the foot of waterfalls. and now her hand above her eyes shielding out the sun. her shirt on her lap. he has come across a love story. this is only a love story. he does not wish for plot and all its consequences. let me stay in this field with alice gull.... remorse he had always wanted to know her when she was old. patrick sits in her green room, in front of leaves and berries in the old river bottle – a bouquet of weeds collected by alice the day before her death. sumac and valley grasses that she picked under the viaduct. when night comes he lights the kerosene lamp, which throws a shadow of this still-life against the wall so it flickers dark and alive. let me now re-emphasize the extreme looseness of the structure of things. whispered to him once. he undresses and climbs into the bed, where there is the smell of her, where he is unable to sleep. he stays in her room, he escorts her last flowers through death and afterlife, after whatever spirit in them has evaporated out of their brownness. he knows he doesn't have long before he loses the exact memory of her face. his mind moves closer to the skin at the side of her nose where the scar lies. she was always too conscious of it, a line she assumed unbalanced her face. how can he evoke her without this fine line? he had wanted to know her when she was old. at lunches she would argue her ideas against him, holding up her glass, "to impatience! to the evolving human!" while he was intent on her shoulder, romantic towards the dazzle of her hair. her grin was always there when he spoke of growing old with her – as if she had made some other pact, as if there was another arrow of alliance. he couldn't wait to know her when, in years to come, they would be solvent, sexually calmer, less like wildlife. there was always, he thought, this pleasure ahead of him, an ace of joy up his sleeve so he could say you can do anything to me, take everything away,put me in prison, but i will know alice gull when we are old. even if we cannot be lovers i will come each afternoon, come as if courting, and over lunch we will share our thoughts, laughing, so this talk will be love. he had wanted that. and what had she wanted? -i was happiest when i was pregnant. when i bloomed. -i don't understand why you like me. -i feel good about myself since i met you. since the days with clara, when you could see nothing else but her and i was watching you. i wasn't jealous. i wasn't in love with you. i was learning wonderful things then, with clara. you and i will never enter certain rooms together, patrick. a woman needs a woman to laugh with, over some things. clara and i felt like a planet! but there was a time after that when i went under. and you gave me an energy. a confidence. now there is a moat around her he will never cross again. he will not even cup his hands to drink its waters. as if, having travelled all that distance to enter the castle in order to learn its wisdom for the grand cause, he now turns and walks away. *** patrick steps out of the verral avenue rooms. he enters union station and, once he is travelling, the landscape slurs into darkness. he focuses thirty yards past the train window until his mind locks, thinking of nothing, not even the death of alice. by his feet is a black cardboard suitcase. he can think now only of objects. something alive, just one small grey bird on a branch, will break his heart. the night train travelling north to huntsville contains a regatta crowd – men in straw boaters and silk scarves jubilant around him. they weave towards the sleeping cars, passing patrick, who stands in the corridor, their drunk bodies brushing against him. he gazes through his reflection, hypnotized by the manic parade of sky and rock and tree and moon. no resolution or pause. alice.... he breathes out a dead name. only a dead name is permanent. rectangles of light sweep along the earth. he walks to the end of the corridor, opens the door, and stands in the no man's land between carriages, holding onto the stiff accordionlike walls, within the violent rattle of the train. alice had an idea, a cause in her eye about wealth and power, forever and ever. and at the end as she turned round to him on the street hearing her name yelled, surprised at patrick being near, there was nothing completed or attained. and he could think of nothing but the eyes looking for him above the terrible wound suddenly appearing as she turned. they arrive in huntsville at three in the morning. patrick watches a porter travel the corridor of sleeping berths, tagging the shoes left out to be cleaned, and return a few minutes later with a sack into which he throws them all. the passengers will not be awakened until seven.

the stewards sit on the steps of the train polishing shoes. they speak quietly, smoking cigarettes. patrick sees them in the yellow spray of the station lamp. he strolls to the end of the platform where there is darkness. bush. he feels transparent, minuscule. civilization now, on this august night, is two men cleaning shoes as they sit on the steps of a train. he looks at them from the darkness. he has walked through the pools of light hanging over this platform and light has not attached itself to him. walking through rain would have left him wet. but light, or a man polishing one tan shoe at four a.m., is only an idea. and this will not convert patrick, whose loss creates venom. at times like this he could put his hand under the wheel of a train to spite the driver. he could pick up a porcupine and thrash it against the fence not caring how many quills were flung into his hands and neck in retaliation. at eight a.m. the passengers walk from the train, sleepy, dazed by their own movement, to the dock belonging to the huntsville and lake-of-bays navigation company. patrick carries his fragile suitcase and boards the algonquin steamer. most of the regatta crowd will be guests at either bigwin inn or the muskoka hotel. patrick watches the scenery as the boat passes the thick-treed islands. now and then there is a clearing of lawn imposed on the landscape. the setting seems strangely spartan to attract so many wealthy people, to be the playground of the rich. he finds a deck-chair and sleeps, and even in sleep his hand clutches the suitcase. he wakes to every hoot of the whistle as the boat winds its way through north portage. when they pass bigwin island, they are greeted by the anglo-canadian band playing on the rock promontory – tubas, trumpets, violins, and various other instruments. patrick waves along with the others. he will not be coming back this way. he might as well wave now. in the garden of the blind, on page island, a stone cherub holds out a hand from which water leaps up into the air. a tree full of birds spreads itself high over the southern area of the lawn. there is a falling of sounds – bird-calls like drops of water – onto the blind woman sitting there. seeds float down onto the gravel borders, a sound path for those walking without sight. on one of the benches, under the tree, patrick sits reading the newspaper. if he closes his eyes, these noises will overpower him, in the way he imagines the cherub accepts that water which leaps from his palm into air and then falls back onto his face. he watches a bird dart. the woman on his right hears the rustle of his newspaper and realizes he is alien here. he is one island over from last night's fire, hiding now in this garden, unseen among the blind, till nightfall. he had loosened the cap on the paraffin can and enclosed it gurgling within his black cardboard suitcase. then he began his walk along the mezzanine of the empty muskoka hotel. he had waited until the guests and staff were outside on the lawns, busy with the regatta dinner. he leaned over the banister to look at the stuffed animal-heads below him, the liquid leaking down, then walked on, the suitcase innocent in his right hand, down the stairs to the lobby. the smell was evident now. fire! he yelled. he lit a match, dropped it, and the fire ran upstairs and round and round the circular mezzanine. his arm was on fire. he plunged the sleeve of his jacket into an aquarium. the suitcase at the foot of the stairs exploded. he moved alone through the lobby of the muskoka hotel, the deerheads above him on fire.

he walked from the fire towards the water. as he made his way to the rowboat, he checked the explosive hidden under the dock. everyone on the blue evening lawn looked at the flames, dumbfounded. some men saw him unhook the boat and pointed. patrick stood in the boat and waved. they waved back uncertainly, then started to run towards the dock casually, in case patrick turned out to be a friend, then jumped onto the dock and began running towards him. he lit the fuse, which raced towards the two men and started to row away from the dock. the fuse, like a nervy kid, buzzed and ran under the men's feet. they stopped and turned. now they realized what it was. the older man leaped into the water and the other, his hands on his hips, paused as the blue fizzing ran into the small explosion that separated the dock from the shore. what he begins to witness now, in the garden of the blind, is not sound but smell the plants chosen with care so visitors can move from fragrance to fragrance with precise antennae. to his left he can smell mock orange. he leans over the raised bed – three feet higher than the path – and sniffs deeply. patrick hears footsteps and a hand touches his back. the blind woman who heard the rustle of newspapers now attaches herself to him. -you can see, she says. -yes. she smiles. -you have a loud nose. her name is elizabeth, and she offers to show him the garden. she mentions that her sister is better at identifying flowers and herbs because she does not drink. "i drink like a porpoise but only from the afternoon on. tragic love affair in my thirties." they walk together and patrick watches how her relaxed body drifts in this world, moving surely towards the basil and broadleaf sorrel. she lowers her hand in passing to brush the soft silk of the foliage called rabbit's grass. her garden is a ballroom and she introduces him to the intimacies of dill and caraway, those shy sisters; she advises him to bend down and bruise certain leaves which are too subtle for him to appreciate when untouched. "to focus your nasal powers you must forget about sounds. the bird sounds here are lovely but sometimes i come here drunk or with a hangover and the noise is awful. then i want to pour medicinal fluids into my handkerchief, climb into the branches, and chloroform them." in the centre of the garden just north of the water-splashed cherub is another tree where there are no birds. "you must be looking at the camphor ... birds recognize death better than us. plants have complex genealogies. to a bird a succulent fruit must first be judged by its bloodlines. you may like cashew nuts or mango, or find sumac beautiful, but a bird knows that these are all, strangely, part of the poison-ivy family. " she leads him towards the imported exotics – fruitless persimmon, and the pimpernella, which is anise. she is curious about him but he will not say very much though he is courteous and he likes her. he will have to stay here till night and then try to swim from the island out to a boat. along the beds on the east side of thegarden there is tarragon and lavender and cardamom. she puts her hands up bluntly to his face and searches him. she finds a welt by his ear. -put perumel on this. a balm. -i am wanted by the police. -for? -for wilful destruction of property. she laughs. -don't resent your life. they are a frieze, a statue in this garden, a woman with her soft palms covering a tall man's face, blinding him. when she moves her hands away from his eyes she feels the gasp on his face which is not shock or disgust but something else. - what is it? her green eye echoes somewhere within him. aetias luna – and its canadian name, papillon lune. lunar moth. moon moth. her other eye is simply not there, the old loose flesh of the eyelid covering nothing. but this eye is forest green, moth green, darting all over as if to catch his gaze, moving with delight over his shoulders, alighting on his ear, his nose. he had loved the lunar moth, its flare of the lower wing like a signature, a papyrus textured object whose small furred body he used to see pulsing on a branch or rock within his lantern light. the woman shifts the watery green mirror of her eye attempting to reflect everything around her. - what is it? patrick allows her to guide him back to the bench. they sit and she grips his hand, not letting go of him. he feels she receives all of his qualities, in this still garden, raucous with noise. the blue veins are narrow and clear in the tight skin of her hands. he is unable to talk, even if all he said would be hidden within her blindness. alice gull, he could say, who once pushed her hands up against the slope of a ceiling and spoke of a grand cause, who leapt like a live puppet into his arms, who died later on a bloody pavement, ruined in his arms. no one else enters the garden as they sit there. beside the wooden seat is mint pepper, rosemary. in the flower-bed to the right of where they sit is artemesia advacumculas, whose human name she says she doesn't know. the muscles in her hand finally loosen and he turns to look at her face. she is now resting, leaning back, gently asleep. he moves his hand from her grip and leaves her. now he is part of the evening water, the reflection of dock lights rolling off him. six stars and a moon. thenews of the fire has left the muskokas in an uproar and patrick struggles to get free of the current off page island in order to swim towards that boat. it has crept across the blackness of the lake at a snail's pace and is now about 500 yards off shore. a night cruise with dancing – he can hear music as he swims, voices and tambourine falling like muffled glass into the water. a half-moon, a few stars, a loop of dock lights. somewhere in his past he has dreamed such a moment: a criminal swimming in darkness to a lighted ship. he feels removed from any context of the world, wanting to sleep at this moment, wanting to swim back into the current he has just escaped, return to the garden of the blind, and sleep. but he is magnetized to the nameless steamer. a deadhead touches him in the ribs, comes up under him, and patrick hears himself shout out in the shriek of an animal. the dreams he had of swimming to a ship involved tropic winds and crocodiles. he splashes out to discover what touched him, but it is gone. "it was a deadhead," he says to himself, talking out loud now, determined, the fear suddenly an energy in him. brushed by this deadhead he is fully alive, feral, exhilarated. he remembers his departure from the world, stepping out onto the porte-cochere of the muskoka hotel, flames behind him. now he will be a member of the night. he sees his visage never emerging out of shadows. unhistorical. he swims on, smelling traces of hickory smoke from the campfires on the island. he is delirious with hunger. music from the boat. "beware of frozen ponds, peroxide blondes, stocks and bonds...." the singer's voice over the muffle of orchestra. and what will they do as they see him climb up a rope into their company, lake weed draped over his shoulder, the blood from the log's glance on his ribs? he is alongside the boat, in the shadow of the moon, looking up. the cherokee. the panel windows from the stateroom and lounge throw out light that falls on the water. higher up is the open deck, the dancing couples, the band. he pulls himself up on the vertical strips of rubber that protect the sides of the steamer when it docks. he smells food on deck, climbs fast, and goes headfirst through a window and lands on a table. he is in the kitchens. a cook turns at the crash to see patrick on his back surrounded by double-diamond glass. patrick puts a finger to his lips, keeping it there till the man nods and moves to close the door. patrick gets down off the table, glass all around him. on deck the pause in conversation is replaced by louder laughter, cheers for the dropped tray or whatever they thought caused the noise. the cook walks over with a broom and sweeps while patrick stands there removing his wet clothes. there is a cut near his ribs and on his thigh. then the cook mimes going to sleep and is gone like a ghost out of the room. patrick walks to the switch and dims out the kitchen light. it must be around midnight. the noise on deck is ceaseless with the orchestra weaving its way through suspicious love, tentative love. the frail music filters down into this large kitchen which he seems to own. he knows he will be caught, probably imprisoned, but for now he thrills to this brief freedom. he squeezes out the clothes, turns on the large ovens, spreads his shirt and trousers flat, and slides them in with a baker's paddle. then he looks for food. there are some cooked potatoes. he pulls out a slab of raw meat from the fridge and crouches behind the counter. he eats only the potato demurely. he cuts the meatinto strips with a sharp knife and eats it, licking the juice that dribbles down his arm. now and then he gets up to drink from the taps and to keep an eye on his clothes cooking at low heat in the oven.