I COULDN'T LIVE LIKE THAT 
By Peter Darbyshire



I WALKED EVERYWHERE in those days. I had a car but I couldn't always afford gas. Sometimes, at night, I went up to the windows of houses and looked inside. In the dark, you can stand right on the other side of the glass, and no one ever knows you're there. From the street, these places always seem like the kind of homes you see in magazine ads, all red walls and leather furniture. Close up, though, it's mostly just people watching television or doing the dishes. Although once I saw a woman feeding soup to a man with two broken legs. There was nothing wrong with his arms but she fed him soup anyway, kneeling beside him on the couch and carefully lifting the spoon to his lips. 

Another time I saw a man putting on eyeliner. I was standing deep in a driveway between houses and looking into a bedroom. I could see him through the cracks between the blinds. He was sitting at a vanity with lights around the mirror. When he was done with the eyeliner he put on eye shadow and lipstick. Then he cleaned his face with a tissue and blew himself a kiss. After that, he walked out of the room and didn't come back. I wondered whose makeup it was. His wife's? His roommate's? 

And once I came across another man doing the same thing as me. I started down a driveway and saw him kneeling on the ground at the other end, his face shining from the light of the basement window in front of him. He never looked away from it, not even when I went back up the driveway. I don't think he ever knew I was there. I never went back to that house again. 

I was twenty-three or twenty-four at the time, I can't really remember anymore. I hadn't worked in months. My wife had left me. Sometimes I woke up with shooting pains in my stomach, like someone had stabbed me while I slept. The doctors said there was nothing wrong with me. 



ON ONE OF THESE walks I met a blind man. It was around five or six in the evening. I could tell he was blind by the fact that he wore those dark glasses and he was tapping around the base of a telephone pole with a long, white cane. When I tried to walk around him, he swung the cane into my legs. It bent like it was made of rubber. I had to stop because he kept the cane in front of me. I couldn't move without jumping over it. 

"I'm a little lost," he said, as if I'd asked him how he was. "There's not a newspaper box around here, is there?" 

"No, there's nothing but the telephone pole," I told him. 

"There's supposed to be a newspaper box," he said, "but I guess my counting got thrown off somewhere." 

"Yes, that's most likely it," I agreed, even though I didn't really know what he was talking about. I waited for him to move the cane but he didn't. 

"I was walking to the school," he went on. "But I should have come across it by now. You don't see a school anywhere, do you?" 

I looked around. We were standing in front of an old Victorian house with vines growing up the front of it. A young girl in white pajamas stood in the front window, watching us. There weren't any lights on behind her. She was just a white silhouette against the darkness. I wondered where her parents were. 

"No," I said, "there's nothing but houses around here." 

"Wow," he said, shaking his head. "I'm really messed up." 

The girl didn't move at all, didn't even seem to blink. She looked like a ghost, and for some reason, that thought reminded me of the last night I ever saw my wife. 

"I could really use some help here," the blind man said. 



THE BLIND MAN KEPT his free hand on my arm while we walked, as if he was afraid I would run away if he didn't. All the way down the street, he tapped the ground in front of us with his cane and counted under his breath. Now that I was taking him back the way he had come, he seemed to know exactly where we were at all times. Every intersection we took, he guided me in a different direction. Soon I was the one who was lost. 

"I have it all memorized," he told me as we went along. "I go for the same walk, to the school and back, every night. Turn left out the door, two hundred and twenty steps to the first right, four hundred and ten from there..." He went on like that for some time and then ended with, "And that box has always been there before, a hundred steps from the intersection, give or take, after the second left turn. Always. I don't understand it." 

"How do you know when you're actually at the school?" I wanted to know. "I mean, even if you take the proper amount of steps, how do you know it's the school and not something else, like a bank or a high-rise?" I pictured him tapping his way around a building, trying to figure out what it was just by its size and shape. Maybe counting taps like he did steps. 

"I can hear the kids," he told me. "There are always kids in the playground, even in the middle of the night. It's like they don't know where else to go." 

Later, he said, "You're probably wondering why I go to the school every day." 

"No, not really." 

"I'm not after any Lolitas, if you know what I mean." 

"No, I don't." 



HE LED ME TO a large house with a fence around the front yard. The fence was taller than me and had trees all around the inside of it. The address was printed on the door, in red paint. It looked like a child had done it. 

"Here we are," he said. 

"Why do you have such a big fence?" I asked. None of the other houses on the street had fences around their front yards. 

"It's so no one can see us," he said. "I think the neighbours complained or something." 

"Us?" I asked. 

"It's kind of like a group home," he said. "For people like me." 

I pictured a whole houseful of blind men, bumping around the halls and asking each other for help just to get out the door. 

"Would you like to come in?" he asked. "For a coffee or something?" 

"I don't think so," I said. 

"Maybe something to eat," he said. "I can make you a sandwich." 

"No, I've really got places to be," I told him. 

"I have drugs." 



HE LED ME THROUGH the front door, which wasn't locked. As soon as he opened the door I heard a woman scream, then the sounds of gunshots. I was ready to run away, or maybe hide behind one of the trees, but he walked in like this was normal, so I followed him. 

Just inside the entranceway was a large living room, and this was where all the noise was coming from. Two men were sitting on a couch underneath the window, watching a big-screen Sony across the room. On the television, some cops in black body armor were standing around a man lying on the ground. He was wearing nothing but shorts, and blood was running out of several bullet holes in his upper body. A woman was standing on the porch of a house in the background, and she was the one who was screaming. I wasn't entirely sure, but I thought I might have seen this before. 

The two men on the couch turned to look at us when we came in, but they didn't say anything. One of them raised a beer can to his lips. "Hello," I said. They still didn't say anything. 

"Don't mind them," the blind man said. "They're deaf." 

They looked back at the television when the scene changed to an outdoors shot. Now a bear was mauling someone on the other side of a parked car. Someone had videotaped the whole thing rather than help. The deaf men started laughing, making noises like barking dogs. 

"It's just down this way," the blind man said, leading me deeper into the house. 



FOR A WHILE during these days I dated a woman who had a metal arm. It was the first woman I'd been with since my wife. She'd lost her real arm in a car accident. She talked about the accident like it didn't mean anything to her. "We were going too fast around a corner and the car rolled. That was it, just one of those stupid, one-car accidents." She never said who the other person was, or which one of them was driving. "Silly me, I had my arm hanging out the window and it got torn off when the car rolled over it." Silly me. She really said that. 

She didn't mind having a metal arm at all. Not that it looked metal. When you put it beside her real arm, you could barely tell them apart. But when you touched this fake arm, it was cold and hard. And it would move on its own. She would take it off and lay it on her dresser, but the fingers would twitch for hours afterwards, and sometimes the elbow would even bend. "It's just going to sleep," she told me. But one night she was moving around and whimpering with some dream, and the arm matched all her movements. It jerked and shook on the dresser, and the fingers balled up into a fist, and then the whole thing fell on the floor. I wouldn't get out of bed the next morning until she'd picked it up and put it back on. 

She lived in a basement apartment with only one window. We had to leave the bedroom door open while we slept for fear we'd suffocate. She couldn't afford anything else because all she had was some sort of disability pension. She wanted to be an actress but she hadn't worked as anything but an extra in years. Who would hire a woman with only one arm? 

We liked to tour condos that were for sale. Only the new ones, though, never anything that had already been lived in. We'd walk through them and make notes in a little notebook we'd bought, talk about the view, look in the cupboards. The salespeople acted like they believed we could actually afford these places. 

One woman opened a bottle of wine for us while we were there. She gave it to us in little plastic glasses. "I'm sorry about that," she said, "but would you believe someone actually stole our real wineglasses?" It was the best wine I'd ever had. 

When the woman asked us what we did, I told her I was a marketer for IBM, and my girlfriend said she was a nurse. 

This woman showed us around the model suite. When she brought us to the living room, the sun was just setting, as if she'd cued it. The entire place filled with a golden light, and I held my girlfriend's hand -- the real one -- until it passed. 

"Now there's a Kodak moment if I've ever seen one," the saleswoman said. 

My girlfriend stood in the middle of the smaller bedroom and looked around. It was a young boy's room, with blue walls and a bed in the shape of a racecar. "We'd want to paint, of course," she said. "When we have the children." 

"Are you expecting?" the saleswoman asked. 

"Oh no," my girlfriend said. "But someday." She looked at me and laughed. 

"Cheers then," the saleswoman said and refilled our glasses. 

She took us into the kitchen last and sat us down around a glass-topped table. There was an espresso maker on the counter and the fridge had an icemaker. 

"Does the place come with all the appliances?" I asked. 

"Oh yes," the woman said. "And there's a pool and a sauna in the building." 

"A pool and a sauna," I repeated. 

"That's right." 

"And we don't have to pay for that?" my girlfriend asked. "We can just use it like everyone else?" 

The woman gave us a blank contract to look at, and a pamphlet full of measurements and costs. I looked at all the numbers and said, "I don't know. I think it's a bit more than we wanted to pay." 

"It always is," she said, still smiling. 

"I mean, I don't know if we can afford a place like this," I said. 

"But if we could," my girlfriend said and shook her head. 

The saleswoman poured the last of the wine into our glasses. "The question you need to ask yourself," she said, "is how can you afford not to have a place like this?" 



MY GIRLFRIEND EVENTUALLY left me for a man with an artificial leg, someone she'd met in her amputee support group. They'd been having an affair for months, pretty much the whole time I'd been dating her. She told me over breakfast one afternoon. 

"What are we going to do now?" I asked, unbelieving. 

"I don't know what you're going to do," she said, watching the fingers of her fake hand flex on the table, "but I know what I'm going to do." 

"His cancer is going to come back, you know," I told her. "It's just growing somewhere else in his body right now." 

"Well, if my mind wasn't made up about you before," she said. 

"One day he's going to start having seizures because of a brain tumour or something. Where will you be then?" 

Her hand spread itself out flat on the table and was still. She looked at me. "I won't be sitting here having this conversation with you," she said. 



AFTER THAT I BEGAN spending all my spare time in movie theaters. There was one -- a Cineplex Odeon with eight screens and Starbucks coffee -- that I went back to over and over. It had air conditioning, and by the time I left my nose would be running, like I had a cold. Whenever one movie ended, I'd get up and go to the next one. Sometimes I'd come in halfway through it, sometimes it would be just beginning. 

Once, a man in dress pants and a golf shirt sat right beside me. He held a bag of popcorn between his legs and asked me if I wanted any. I moved up several rows, and he didn't follow me. 

Another time an usher woke me by shining a flashlight into my eyes. "You've been here all day," he said. 

"I paid, I paid," I told him. I looked at the screen, but it was blank, the curtain drawn. There was no one else in the theatre. 

"You paid for one show," he said. "You've been here all day." He was young, a teenager, with slicked-back hair and a thin moustache. 

"I fell asleep." 

"You have to leave before the next movie starts." He kept shining the flashlight in my eyes, even though the house lights were on. 

"The place is empty," I said. "What difference does it make?" 

"The difference is that you only paid for one show." 

"Come on," I said. "Help a man out." 

"Do you really want me to get the manager?" he asked. 



BUT I HAVE TO tell you about what happened in the blind man's room.

We smoked a joint that tasted like cinnamon. He told me it was laced with a mild hallucinogen. "It's the only way I can see these days," he said. 

We were sitting on his bed, and he'd taken his glasses off. He was staring at a spot two inches over my head. Now that I looked at him close, I could see his eyes were all scarred and the skin of his face pocked, like someone had taken a small knife to him. I was fully expecting him to make a pass at me, but he never did. 

At some point in the night I asked him, "What kind of home is this?" 

"What do you mean?" 

"I mean, is everyone who lives here blind or deaf or something?" 

"Oh yeah. But none of us were born this way, we were all normal once. You can't get in here unless you've been in an accident or something. Like the deaf guys. One of them blew his own eardrums out when he shot himself in the head." 

"He shot himself in the head and he didn't die?" 

"Yeah, it hit his skull and traveled around, went out the back. Never even touched his brain. But it made him deaf for some reason. The doctors couldn't explain it." 

"What about the other one?" I asked. 

"I don't know. It was some disease or something." 

"Jesus," I said. "I had no idea there were places like this." 

"You should see the people upstairs," he said. "Some of them can't even walk. They just lie in their rooms all day, watching television and talking to God, if they can even do that." 

"I couldn't live like that," I told him. 

"Maybe not," he said, "but what else can you do?" 

There were no lamps in his room, but I could still see because there was light coming in through the window, from somewhere close. I got up and opened the blinds. The neighbouring house was only five or six feet away. I was looking into someone's kitchen. It was a big room, with an island in the center and stainless-steel pots hanging everywhere. It looked like an Ikea display. There was a woman sitting on the island, in between a wooden dish rack and a stack of magazines. Her skirt was pulled up around her hips, and a man was kneeling in front of her, his head and one of his hands between her thighs. She was looking right at me. I wasn't sure if they were really there or if I was just imagining them. Looking back on it now, I'm pretty sure I imagined them. But back then, I just didn't know. 

"I think your neighbours are fucking," I told the blind man. 

"You can see my neighbours?" He stood and came over to the window, turned his head from side to side. 

The woman kept looking out her window but didn't seem to notice either one of us. She leaned back on one hand and ran the other through the man's hair. He had a bald spot at the back of his head. 

"You can really see them?" he asked. "Where are they?" 

"They're in the kitchen. They're fucking right there on the counter." 

"Tell me what they look like," the blind man said. He had his hand on my arm again. 

"She looks like the kind of woman you'd see on television," I said. "I don't know about him. I can't see his face because he's going down on her." 

"Really?" He leaned forward, until his nose touched the glass. 

"She's got her legs wrapped around his shoulders and everything," I told him. 

"Wow. What are her tits like? Are they big?" 

"I don't know, she's still dressed. She's just pulled up her skirt." 

"But what do they look like? Do they look big?" 

"They're all right, I guess." 

"What about her panties?" 

"I don't know. I can't see them. Maybe she wasn't wearing any." 

"And her skirt?" 

"It's a red floral thing. And a white shirt. Some sort of silk material." 

"Oh yeah," he said. "I can see it." 

The two of us stood there in silence for a moment, me watching this couple having sex, the blind guy staring in their direction and not seeing anything, or maybe seeing something only he could see, and the woman staring back at us. If she was even there at all. 

She closed her eyes when she came. From this close, I could see the flush to her skin. The man stood up and grabbed a dishtowel from the counter, wiped his face with it. She hit him lightly on the shoulder and laughed as she hopped off the counter. They went out of the kitchen and didn't come back again. I never did see the man's face. 

"Tell me what they're doing now," the blind man said when they were gone. 


COULD I AFFORD YOU?
By Peter Darbyshire



I WAS SITTING BESIDE an actor. We were talking to each other's reflections in the mirror behind the bar. 

"I had an audition today," he told me. "They're going to pay me ten thousand dollars to be a body double." He shook his head like he was disappointed.

"What is it, some kind of stunt?" I asked.

"No, it's for this sex scene. You don't even get to see my face." He sipped his drink, some sort of martini, and sighed.

The bar was empty except for us and the one waitress working. It was two in the afternoon. He'd walked in and sat on the stool beside me, started talking like he was a friend of mine. He'd even bought me a beer. For that I had to listen to him. 

"You should have seen the audition," he went on. "I thought it would be something personal, you know? Maybe me and the director in some locked room somewhere. A lot of talk about motivation and that kind of thing."

"Something intimate," I said.

"Exactly. Only it was nine fucking a.m. in this bright office, and there were two other people in there with him. The director of photography and some woman lawyer."
"Why'd they have a lawyer there?"

"I don't know. Something to do with lawsuits. Anyway, the audition consisted of me having to act the scene out. Only they made me do it with this blow-up doll instead of with a real person."

"You fucked a doll? With other people in the room?"

"No, no, I didn't fuck it. I acted like I was making love to it. It was an audition, remember?"

"I don't know," I said, "I don't think I could have done that."

"Oh, it wasn't so bad."

"Was it one of those lifelike dolls?" I asked. "The kind with the holes and everything?"

"You're missing the point here," he said.



WHEN I WASN'T working, I spent most of my time at The Code. It was one of those underground bars, the kind that no matter when you leave, you're always walking up into the light. The walls were covered in old movie posters. Bogart, Dean, Hepburn. It was always filled with beautiful people. There was some sort of modeling studio in the building upstairs and a Club Monaco across the street. The actor told me that all the movie stars drank there when they were in town. It was like I was living in L.A. or someplace like that.

The waitresses got to know me by name. They never charged me for more than six or seven drinks. One of them - she was Indian or Asian, I couldn't really tell - wanted to be a model, but she had a lazy eye, so she was never going to get any work. She called herself Mercedes, but I didn't think that was her real name. I was in love with her even though she was going out with the actor.

One night she sat with me at the bar after her shift was done. There was a man in a leather body suit a few stools down, drinking a Scotch. We all watched one of those medical shows on television. A team of surgeons was operating on a baby still in the womb. They cut open the mother and then cut open the baby inside her. They were playing Vivaldi in the operating room to keep the patients calm. There was something wrong with the baby's spine, but the announcer said it would be okay after the surgery. 

"Imagine that," I said. "If someone fixed all your problems before you were born."

"Why wouldn't she just abort it and try again?" Mercedes asked.

"Just think about it," I told her. "What if someone had fixed your eye before anyone else had a chance to see it? Where would you be then?"

She lit a cigarette and looked at me through the smoke. "Why is it that you never go home?" she asked.

"What would I do there?"

"What do you do here?"

I turned back to the television. "The important thing," I said, "is that the baby is all right."

At some point in the night - I don't remember if it was before or after the surgery show - the man in the leather suit came over to us. "Would you like to come into the back room with me?" he asked Mercedes. 

"I don't think so," she said. 

"You don't have to do anything," he said. "You can just watch."

"Hey," I said, but neither one looked at me.

"I have a boyfriend," she said.

"Bring him along."

"Does your wife know you do this?"

"Married? I'm not married."

"I can see the ring mark on your finger." It was true - there was a thin band of scar tissue around his ring finger, as if he'd been married for years.

"Divorced," he said. "I can't even remember her name."

"That's what they all say," she said.

"How about if I pay you?" he asked. "Just to watch, like I said."

"You couldn't afford me."

"What about you?" he said, looking at me for the first time. "Could I afford you?"



THE CODE HAD a room in the back that was only for special events. The walls were painted black, and all the furniture was covered in white sheets. There were no windows. When there wasn't an event taking place, you could only get in with a key that was kept behind the bar. Sometimes the lights inside were red.

Every Monday there was a fetish party in the room. All night long people would walk in wearing leather or latex or even plastic. Sometimes men would show up in heels or fishnet stockings. Women with safety pins in their cheeks and arms. Once I saw a man leading a woman by a chain tied around her neck.

But mainly it was normal people, people in suits or dressed like you and me. They came in and had a drink or two at the counter and then changed in the washroom. When they came out they'd be wearing handcuffs or corsets or sometimes just leather underwear.

I wanted to look inside, to see what they did in there, but you had to pay ten dollars at the door. The man who'd asked Mercedes to go back there ran the parties and he stood outside the door most of the night with a little cash box. And the people inside all laughed and shouted at each other like they belonged there.

Once, though, no one at all showed up. It was raining so hard a storm sewer outside had overflowed, and water was trickling down the stairs into The Code. Mercedes was out with the actor. He'd picked her up after work, and the two of them had gone up into the storm, leaving me alone at the bar. 

Now the man who ran the fetish nights - he later told me his name was Christopher, "like the saint" - was sitting beside me, drinking another Scotch. This time he wore leather pants with a mesh shirt that had no back. I could see his pierced nipples through the shirt. We were watching the television above the bar, but something was wrong with it - it kept flipping channels on its own, every few seconds. 

"How come you haven't come to any of the parties yet?" Christopher wanted to know.

"It's not really my scene," I told him.

"You don't know until you try," he said.

"I don't think so."

The television finally seemed to settle on the Discovery Channel, but then the screen went dead as the power went out. There was only the light of the candles to see by. I waited for the power to come back up but it didn't.

"Someone must have hit a line somewhere," Christopher said. "We'll probably be this way for a while."

I thought about going home and looked out the front door. It was raining harder than before. I didn't even own an umbrella.

"We could go back there now," he said. "While we're waiting."

I pulled a couple of candles closer and didn't say anything, just looked up at the dead television.

"I won't even charge you."



THE AIR IN THE back room smelled like it had been in there for years. All the couches and chairs had been pulled up against the walls, and the fetish gear filled the center of the room. There were large wooden crosses you tied people to, and benches for kneeling on, and padded handcuffs hanging from the ceiling beams. 

"Try anything you want," Christopher said. He leaned against one of the crosses and watched me.

"I'm just looking," I said.

"There's more in the corner," he said, pointing at a stack of boxes.

There was everything inside them - crumpled leather gloves, plastic balls with straps attached, wooden paddles. I put on a zippered face mask with no mouth hole, only openings for the nose and eyes. It tasted of salt.

"It's you," Christopher said.

Another box held a collection of whips. I pulled up the mask so I could speak. "What are these for?" I asked.

"What do you think they're for?"

I took out a short whip with a dozen leather straps the length of my forearm and snapped it through the air a couple of times. "You don't actually hit each other with these things, do you?"

"Why don't you give it a try?" he asked.

"I don't think so," I said. "I'm not that way."

"Just once," he said. "You might like it." He turned around and spread himself against the rack. The bare skin of his back looked golden in the candlelight. I walked up behind him but didn't do anything. "I can't," I said.

"I don't mind."

I hit him with the whip as hard as I could. It made the same kind of noise as punches do in movies. I was surprised to see blood on his skin right away.

"Jesus Christ!" He jumped away from me and stumbled over one of the benches, fell to the floor. "You fucking maniac!"

"What?" I asked. "You said I could."

"Not that fucking hard," he shouted. He felt around behind his back and then showed me his bloody fingertips. "Look at that! I'm going to need a doctor now!"

"Maybe they have a first-aid kit here," I said.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?"

"But isn't this what you all do in here?" I asked.

The only waitress working came to the door and stopped.

"Do you know where the first-aid kit is?" I asked.

She looked at me standing there with the whip and the mask, looked at Christopher writhing on the floor, and then she closed the door.



SOMETIMES THE PEOPLE from the modeling studio upstairs used the room for shoots. It would always be one man - the photographer - and a group of women. They'd come in and get the key from whatever waitress was working and lock themselves in there. Sometimes they wouldn't come out for hours. I imagined them having sex in there, on the couches or maybe on piles of the clothes they brought in with them, like a scene out of some movie.

One night I helped with a shoot. A photographer came in with three models from upstairs. None of the women looked over eighteen, but one of them paid for a round of drinks with a gold card. They sat at the booth underneath the Hepburn poster and smoked cigars all night long. They were sitting in the No Smoking section, but the waitress working that night - a new woman I didn't know, who charged me full price for the drinks - never said anything to them. 

Around midnight, the photographer came over to the bar, where I'd been sitting all night. "You work here?" he asked. I looked around for the waitress, but she was nowhere in sight. 

"Yeah," I said. "I work here."

"We're ready for the back room now," he said.

I wasn't exactly sure what he meant, but I went around the counter and got the key anyway. When I opened the door, the models all wandered into the room and sat down on the furniture there. Each of them carried a couple of garment bags that they dropped to the floor once they were inside. "I could use a glass of water," one of them said. She held her foot up to look at her toenails. I went back to the bar and poured some water into a glass, threw a lemon slice from a bowl into it, and brought it to her. She took it without saying thanks or even looking at me.

The photographer had taken the sheets off the fetish equipment and was looking at it all.

"We need this stuff brought out and, um, arranged," he said.

"All right." I dragged the wooden crosses out to where he pointed and turned them around under the lights until he told me to stop. The models watched in silence. One of them fell asleep for a while.

"That's enough," the photographer eventually said to me. I let go of the aluminum cage I'd pushed out of one of the corners and stood next to him, like I was his assistant or something. "Why don't we start with that black vest thing?" he said to one of the women. 
She nodded and stood up, started to take off her shirt. She had on a black lace bra underneath.

"What kind of shoot is this?" I asked. I imagined seeing this room and these models on bus ads, or maybe even billboards.

"It's nothing like that," the photographer said. "These are just, ah, audition photos."

The model opened up one of the garment bags and took out a sleeveless leather vest, put it on. It zipped up to her throat. The photographer pushed her against one of the crosses. "Could you hold her hands?" he asked. I thought he meant me and I started to step forward, but he was talking to one of the other models. She walked around behind the cross and held the first one's wrists. The third one took a cell phone out of her pocket and started talking on it. "I won't be making class tomorrow," she said. "Can you take notes for me?"

"Maybe one of those balls in her mouth," the photographer said, and this time he looked at me.

I went over to the boxes and searched through them until I found what he wanted, a red plastic ball with a leather head strap attached. "You want me to put it on her?" I asked.

Just then the waitress came in. "What are you doing in here?" she asked.

"We're working," I said.

"What are you talking about?" she asked. "You don't work here."

Everyone looked at me.

"It's just for tonight," I said.

"No," she said, "you don't work here."

The photographer took the mouthpiece from my hands. "Maybe you should lock the door," he said to the waitress.

"Oh, come on," I said.



NOW IT WAS THE day after that incident and I was sitting alone at the bar again, watching television. Someone drove a Volvo off a cliff. A group of men and women in white lab coats watched. The sky was a shade of blue I'd never seen before. There was a quick close-up of the driver of the car, screaming as it fell down toward the ground.

"Isn't that your boyfriend?" I asked Mercedes.

"I don't have a boyfriend," she said.

The camera cut to the wrecked car at the bottom of the cliff. It looked like it had been run through a crusher. Then the door opened and the driver stepped out, waved at the men and women in lab coats. The Volvo logo appeared on the screen.

"Yeah, that's your boyfriend," I said.

She looked at the television. "I don't know who that is," she said.



BUT HE CAME in that very afternoon. He stood beside me and leaned against the bar. He was wearing a silver Rolex that looked new. Mercedes was sitting at the end of the bar, smoking a cigarette and reading a Vogue. "What do you want?" she asked him.

"I want my videos back," he said.

"Not the ones I'm in," she said. "No way."

"I don't want those," he said. "I want the films."

"Fine. You can have those."

"I know I can have them. They're mine." 

"I'll drop them off on the weekend."

"All right." He sat down beside me and tossed a gold card on the counter. "In the meantime I want a latte."

"I'm not serving you."

He looked at his reflection in the mirror. "I want a latte. With cinnamon."

"You hear that?" Mercedes said to me. "He wants a latte."

"I don't hear anything," I said.

He turned to look at me. "Who the fuck are you," he asked, "to talk to me?"

I looked at Mercedes, but she just kept on reading the Vogue. I reached behind the counter and grabbed the key, went to the back room. I emptied the boxes onto the floor until I found one of the whips. Then I went back into the main room.

Mercedes and the actor both laughed when they saw me. "What do you think you're going to do with that?" he asked.

I stopped behind him. "The lady asked you to leave," I said, meeting his gaze in the mirror.

"All right," Mercedes said. "I think this has gone far enough."

"Is this what you've been reduced to?" the actor asked, looking at her. "The lady? You sorry cunt."

I hit him with the whip. I was careful not to hit him hard, but the leather straps still made a sound like a slap.

"Hey," he said. He covered his face with his hands, even though I hit him on the back. "Hey hey hey hey!"

I kept hitting him. He got off the stool and ran toward the door, and I followed him. Mercedes was laughing even harder now, and I started laughing myself. "Who's the cunt now?" I asked. "Huh? Who's the cunt now?"



THE RAIN HAD FINALLY stopped, and now I was sitting beside a table of three women who looked like secretaries. One of them was wearing a red silk blindfold, even though it wasn't a fetish night. A sign made of red construction paper hung from a string around her neck. It said, Kiss Me, I'm Getting Married. The others already wore wedding bands. There was no one else in the place.

Mercedes had stopped coming to work. I went to The Code every day for a week, sometimes staying six or eight hours, but she never showed up again. None of the other waitresses knew what had happened to her. That's what they told me, anyway.

"When are you getting married?" I asked the blindfolded woman.

"Next month," one of the other women said. She had blond hair that was black at the roots.

"Well, you've got plenty of time to live a little then."

"That's what we're doing," the blond-haired woman said. They were all smiling and pushing their gold bracelets up and down their arms.

"You know what I mean," I said.

"No, we don't," she said, but she was laughing when she said it.

I went over to the bar and ordered a round of martinis from the waitress, the one who charged me full price for everything. "Put it on my tab," I told her. 

"You don't have a tab," she said. "But I can put it on your bill."

"That'll be fine," I said.

"How are you going to pay for all this?" she asked me. 

"I have three credit cards," I told her.

"Maybe you should give me one now. Just to make sure."

Back at the table, I asked the blindfolded woman what her husband did. 

"We're not married yet," she said. It was the first time I'd heard her speak. She sounded like she'd been drinking for some time before they came in here.

"What's your boyfriend do then?" I asked.

"He's a lawyer," she said.

"A corporate lawyer," the blond-haired woman put in.

"A lawyer?" I said. "That the best you can do?"

"What about you?" the third woman asked. She had a huge purple blemish on her cheek, like she'd been burned or punched hard. "What do you do?"

"Me? I'm a doctor."

"A doctor."

"That's right."

"What's your specialty, doc?"

"I fix kids."

When the martinis came, the two women who could see just stared at them. "We didn't order these," the blond-haired woman said. 

"What are they?" the blindfolded woman asked.

"They're from him," the waitress said, nodding in my direction. The secretaries all turned their heads my way for a moment.

"To marriage," I said.

They sipped the martinis and started talking about something to do with the wedding - the colour of the dresses or the flowers or something like that. I got up and went to the washroom.

When I came out, only the blindfolded woman was sitting at the table, alone with the half-finished martinis. The others were at the bar, ordering more drinks. I stopped and stood beside their table for a moment.

The blindfolded woman turned her head in my direction, like she sensed me there. I bent down beside her. She licked her lips, flattened her hands on the table. For a moment I just looked at her, watching the way she strained against the silk covering her eyes. Then I kissed her gently, just brushing my lips against hers. I could taste mint on her breath. She put her hand on my chest. We only went on that way for a second or two, but it was like we had been lovers for years.



THIS ISN'T WHAT I WANTED 
By Peter Darbyshire


DURING SOME OF THIS TIME, I worked in a call center. It was the kind of place you see on television - all pink cubicles and windowless walls. I worked the night shift, taking roadside assistance calls. It was the only job the temp agency could find for me. 

People phoned me for help all night long. The woman who trained me - an older woman who wore bifocals and whose name was actually Hope - told me to always act like I cared about their problems. "Ask them if they're all right first," she said. "Then make sure their membership is still valid." She told me she'd been a social worker before this.

"And what if their membership's not valid?" I asked.

"Then you don't have to pretend to care anymore," she said. "Get them off the line."

"But what if they're in real trouble?" I wanted to know. "What if they're lying in a ditch somewhere, pinned inside the car while water rises all around them?" 

"Then you're the last person they should be calling for help," she said.



BUT SOMETIMES PEOPLE did call when they were in real trouble. Once, a woman started screaming that she was on fire before I could even say anything.

"Are you all right?" I asked, remembering what Hope had told me.

"I just said I'm on fire," she shrieked. "Does that sound all right to you?"

"What part of you is on fire?" I asked. "Is it your clothes? If it's your clothes, just take them off."

"My car," she said. "My car is on fire." I could hear a horn go off in the background, and what sounded like a child's laughter. 

"Shouldn't you be calling 911 or someone like that?" I asked.

"I did, I did," she said. "But I need all the help I can get here."

"All right," I said. "I just need your membership number."

"My membership number?" I could hear a car alarm going off now. "It's ... Don't you even want to know where I am?"

"I need the number first," I told her. "I have to enter everything into the computer in the right order."

"My car is on fire," she shouted, "and you're talking to me about order?"

"There's nothing I can do," I told her. "It's the system."

Her voice faded. "Don't worry about the damned groceries," I heard her yell at someone. "The car is going to blow up!"

"I don't think cars actually blow up," I said. "I think that's only in the movies."

"What are you saying?" she asked, back now. "Are you telling me my car is not blowing up?"

"I'm just saying I think that's only in the movies."

"I wish this was a movie."



MOSTLY, THOUGH, it was just sending out tow trucks for cars with dead batteries or empty gas tanks. During storms, the calls were back to back, all night long. I couldn't take a break until it slowed down, because the system automatically routed waiting calls to me. When I did get a break, I had to sign out of my computer. The router stopped sending me calls for exactly ten minutes, after which it started up again whether I was in my cubicle or not.

Once, I came back to my cubicle late and found the phone ringing and my supervisor, Adam, sitting in my chair, feet up on the desk. His eyes were closed, and he was wearing a special headset that let him listen to anyone's call without them knowing. He was twenty-two but already going bald.

"I don't know what you did before this," he told me, still not opening his eyes, "but you can't do it here."

"I was only two minutes late," I said.

"Every time you're late, you get docked an hour's pay. It's automatic."

"That's not really fair," I said.

He only opened his eyes when he got out of my chair and stretched. His back made cracking noises, and I could hear distant voices coming from his headset. "It has nothing to do with fair," he said. "It has to do with the system."



NONE OF THE CALLERS knew we could listen to them when we put them on hold. Sometimes I did it just to hear what they would say. Once I heard a man with a dead battery threaten his girlfriend. "When we get out of this," he said, "I am going to fuck you up so bad." I could hear her laugh in the background.

"No," he said, "I mean it." But she kept on laughing.

Another man, this one with a flat tire, seemed to be having sex with someone. As soon as I put him on hold he started moaning. "Mmm," he said, "God!"

I came back on the line. "Everything all right?" I asked.

"Everything except the car," he said, his voice back to normal.

"Just checking," I said and put him on hold once more.

"Don't stop," he groaned.



AND I HAD a regular caller, a man named Jude. The first time he called, he told me he'd run out of gas. The info on the computer said he was from Yellowknife. "How's the weather up there?" I asked him as I filled in the forms on the screen. Hope said to always keep people talking. If they were talking, they weren't wondering what you were doing.

"Oh, it's not so bad," Jude said. "No worse than usual, anyway."

I looked up at the television mounted in one corner of the office. It was always tuned to one of the weather channels, and right now it was showing the entire state covered in a snowstorm.

"How long do you think it'll take to get someone out here?" he asked.

"Depends on how many other people are broken down," I said. 

"Because I need to find my girlfriend," he said.

"Maybe you should call her and let her know you're going to be late," I said.

"No, no," he said, "I have to find her. She hasn't been home in two days, and I really don't know where she is."

"Well, that's not really our business," I said.

"I don't know what to do," he went on. "She's usually only gone the night."

"Have you tried calling the police?" I asked.

"The police." He laughed. "What are they going to do?"

I finished the forms and asked him where to send the driver with the gas. He gave me the address, and I paused as I looked at the screen.

"Isn't that your home address?" I asked.

"That's right," he said.

"You ran out of gas at home?" I asked.

"Well, technically it happened down the street a bit," he said, "but I managed to get her back in the driveway before she really gave out on me."

"Is there anything else I can help you with?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said. There was a silence, like he was waiting for me to say something.

"Well, good luck with this girlfriend thing," I said.

"It's not luck I need," he said.



HOPE SAT IN THE cubicle next to mine. Every shift she received an obscene call. "It's always the same guy," she told me one night while we were waiting for the computers to come back up after a system crash. "He never says anything, but I know."

"How can you tell it's him if he doesn't say anything?" I asked.

"He always comes at the same time," she said. She tapped her watch. "Sixty seconds, that's all it takes."

"He comes when he's talking to you?" 

"I can tell by the breathing," she said. "You know, it starts off slow and quiet, and then, wham, it's like he's dying."

"And you listen to this?" I asked. "Why don't you disconnect?"

She shrugged. "It's only sixty seconds out of my day," she said. "And it's a break from the regular type of calls." She leaned back in her chair and folded her hands on her lap, stared at her blank screen. "But I can't tell you how glad I am I wasn't born with a penis."

Once, she let me listen to him. I'd just come back from a break, and she waved me over. I plugged my headset into the extra jack on her phone base in time to hear this man gasping like he was running a marathon or something. 

"Hello?" Hope said. "Is anyone there?"

The man made choking noises. 

"Can I help you?" Hope asked, smiling at me. He let out a long sigh, and she pointed at her watch. "Hello?" she said again and kept repeating it until we heard the dial tone.

I unplugged my headset from her phone. "How does he keep getting you?" I asked. "I thought the calls were all routed automatically."

"They are," she said. "So I don't think it's coming from outside."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"It's someone in here," she said, looking around the room. There were maybe a dozen men scattered around the cubicles. "But at least now I know it's not you."



I ONLY RECEIVED one obscene call during the time I was there. It was around three or four in the morning, the quiet time. "Bitch," the man whispered after I answered. "Slut."

"Hey," I said. "You're talking to a man."

"Tell me what you're wearing," he went on. "I want to know what you look like." I could hear soft slapping noises in the background. 

"I've got an obscene call," I said to Hope.

"It's not my guy, is it?" she asked, frowning.

"Put me on the speaker phone," he gasped. 

"No, this one talks," I told her.

"You cunt," he sobbed.

"What if someone was really in trouble?" I said to him. "What if their car was on fire and they were trying to call right now, but couldn't get through because of you?"

"That's it," he moaned and came.



JUDE CALLED ME two more times. The first time, his voice was low and thick, as if he was thinking about each word. "I was hoping you were working tonight," he said.

"How did you get me again?" I asked. 

"I just kept trying until you answered," he said. "It only took three times."

"Why me?" I asked.

"I thought we developed a rapport the other night," he said. He pronounced the "t" in "rapport."

"Well, what can I do for you this time?" I asked.

"Dead battery," he said. "I need a boost."

"Your car in the driveway again?" I asked. 

"It's a truck," he said. "And yeah, it is."

"All right," I said. I started on the forms. "How's the weather tonight?"

"It's getting worse," he said. "I don't think I'm going to be able to make it to work."

I looked up at the television. The weather channel was predicting sunshine for Yellowknife all week.

"All right, I'll send someone right away," I said.

"That'd be great," he said. There was a sound like ice clinking in a glass, and then he said, "I couldn't find her. She still hasn't come back."

"Who hasn't come back?" I asked.

"My girlfriend," he said. "It's been a week now."

"I don't think this is something I can help you with," I said.

"But she did call," he went on.

"Well, what more do you want?" I asked.

"She doesn't think it's working out between us," he said. "Now what am I supposed to do?"

"Have you tried asking her what the problem is?" I said.

"Oh yeah," he said. "She said she wasn't really sure. It was just a feeling she had. What am I supposed to say to that?"

"Maybe it's time to move on," I said. 

"No, I can't do that," he said. "I just to need to repair this, uh, situation."

"I don't see why you're telling me all of this," I said.

"You talk to people all the time for your job, right?" he said.

"Yes ..." I said.

"So you're good with communicating."

"I mainly dispatch tow trucks," I told him. "That doesn't require too much communication."

"And you help people," he said. "That's exactly the combination I need."

"I don't understand," I said.

"I'll get her back here," he said, "and we'll call you. Then you can talk to her. And you'll fix everything for us. Right?"

I didn't say anything for a moment. 

"Right?" he said again.

"Sure," I said.

"You'll take care of us?"

"I'll take care of you," I said.

When the call was done, Adam came on the line. "What," he said, "was that?"

I looked around but couldn't see him anywhere.

"This is a call center," he said, "not a distress line."

"What could I do?" I said.

"You could have told him to call back only if had a real problem. You could have not said you'd help him talk to his girlfriend."

"That was just to get rid of him."

"If he does call back, I want you to hang up on him."

"All right," I said.

"Or we'll be hanging up on you."



AND ONCE I HAD a suicide call. Before I could even say anything, the woman on the other end said, "I'm going to kill myself."

"You have the wrong number," I told her. "This is for people whose cars have broken down."

"I'm sitting in my car," she said. "I've got a knife. And a whole bottle of sleeping pills."

"Is there anything wrong with the car?" I asked her.

"I'm broken," she said. "I'm going to kill myself."

"So there's nothing wrong with the car," I said.

"No," she said. "The car is fine. I just had it tuned up, in fact. I'm driving it around as we speak."

"Well, what do you want from me then?" I asked.

"I want you to listen."

I looked up, across the room, and saw Adam standing outside his office, gazing around the floor. He was wearing his headset but he wasn't looking at me. I disconnected and went outside for a break.

Hope was standing on the stairs outside the building, smoking a cigarette. I told her about the suicide call. 

"They always want you to listen," she said and shook her head.

"I'm not trained for this," I said.

"I wouldn't worry about it," she told me. "It's best never to believe anything these people say."

"So you don't think she was going to kill herself?"

"Well, what would you be able to do about it if she was?" She shook her head again. "No, it's really best not to believe them."



THE LAST TIME Jude called was the night I was fired. "I couldn't get her to come back here," he said, "so I'm just going to call her on my cell phone and we'll do it that way."

"You can't keep calling like this," I said.

"I can tell you what she says," he went on, "or I can just put the two phones together and you can talk to her directly. Whatever works for you."

"What works for me is hanging up right now," I said.

"But you're here to help me," he said. "It says so right on my membership card."

"Goodbye," I told him.

"I locked my baby in the truck," he said quickly.

I paused but didn't say anything.

"The truck's still running," he said. "In the garage. It's going to fill up with carbon monoxide."

"Why don't you just open the garage door," I said.

"It's stuck," he said. "Frozen solid. You have to help me."

"Don't do this," I told him.

"If you hang up on me," he said, "you'll be killing my baby."

"Do you even have a baby?" I asked.

"It's ours," he said. "Me and my girlfriend's."

I didn't say anything for a moment, and he took my silence for assent, started giving me the information I needed. By the time I was done filling out the forms on the computer, I could hear a distant ringing. "I'm just calling her now," he said, his voice distant. I realized he had put the phones up against each other and was listening in on both.

But there was no answer. The phone kept ringing and ringing. There wasn't even voice mail. "All right," I said after a minute or so of this. "You have to stop."

"Can we call her back later?" Jude asked.

"Yeah, we can call her back later," I said.

"I'll tell her to buy an answering machine," he said. "So you can leave a message if she's not there."

"All right," I said. "Sure."

"Great," he said.

"Someone will be there shortly to get your baby out of the truck," I said.

"Right, right," he said and hung up.

Adam came on the line right away. "You can start packing up your things now," he said.

I didn't even bother looking around for him. "What else could I do?" I said.

"I don't know," he said.

"Did you listen to the whole call?" I asked.

"Yeah."

"Then why didn't you say something earlier?" I asked. "Why didn't you just disconnect the call?"

"It wasn't my call," he said. "It was yours."

"Do you think there really was a baby?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said. There was only dead air for a moment, and then he said, "It's nothing personal."



OUTSIDE, HOPE WAS standing on the steps of the building, smoking a cigarette. I told her what had happened. She looked at me for a moment, then up at the sky. It was beginning to rain again. I couldn't see the moon anywhere.

"You got fired over someone you don't even know?" Hope asked.

"I sort of knew him," I said.

She took one last drag on the cigarette and then dropped it to the ground. "I hope he doesn't call me next."

"He just needs someone to talk to," I said.

Hope nodded, then said, "Well, I'd better get back inside. Someone's going to have to take all your calls now." But she paused halfway in there, holding the door open as she looked back at me. "I never talk to them myself," she said. "But I've been doing this a lot longer than you."

I didn't say anything, just looked at her. She closed the door and disappeared back into the building, leaving me alone there.

"All right," I said and went down the steps. "It's all right."



PLEASE
By Peter Darbyshire



I MET THE COMA WOMAN at Kennedy's place. I went there to talk to him about a job, but he was throwing a party when I drove up. People were staggering out of his yard and falling down in the street. I drove around them and parked a dozen houses up, then walked back, holding my jacket over my head to protect myself from the rain. Two weeks of it had turned all the lawns into swamps and still it came down, filling the air like static. At the end of Kennedy's driveway, two women were trying to lift a man who was lying face down in the street, his head half-submerged in the overflow from a storm drain. "He's going to drown," one of the women kept saying, but the other was laughing so hard they couldn't even get his face out of the water. 

Kennedy was sitting on the swing set in the front yard, smoking a joint with a woman who held an umbrella above them. For some reason he was wearing a housecoat over his jeans and T-shirt. "Hey, glad you could make it," he said and offered me the joint. He kept holding it out to me even after I shook my head.

"I didn't know you were having a party," I said.

"It's to celebrate my new job," he said.

"You didn't invite me," I said.

"I didn't?"

"Wyman told me you had a line on a job. I came here to talk to you about that. I didn't know anything about a party."

"I got a job," Kennedy said. "I don't have anything for you."

Beside him, the woman reached out and took the joint from his hand, then disappeared under the umbrella. 

The rain was starting to seep through my jacket, which I was still holding over my head. Kennedy kept on grinning at me, but he had to blink against the rain hitting his eyes. Finally, he said, "Well, the important thing is that you're here now."



WE WENT UP the stairs to his apartment and into the kitchen, where half a dozen men and women were playing cards at the table. They all looked at me for a moment and then went back to staring at their cards. I didn't know any of them. Kennedy took a pair of Heinekens from the fridge and handed me one. "It's all that's left," he apologized.

"Those are mine," said one of the card players, a man with dreadlocks and a beard. He hadn't looked away from his cards.

I turned to Kennedy, but he'd already wandered off into the living room. 

"Help yourself," the other man said. He threw out the jack of spades and kept staring at his hand. "I just want you to know they're mine."



THERE WERE ANOTHER dozen or so people in the living room, talking in the corners or dancing in the middle of the room. All the furniture had been pushed to the walls. The music was coming from speakers taped to the ceiling fan with duct tape. The television was on in one corner of the room, showing the aftermath of some bombing somewhere, but the sound was muted. Kennedy and I sat on the couch, beside the coma woman. I thought she was only sleeping at first, but she didn't wake up when I pushed her legs aside, just moaned a little and wrapped her arms tighter around the cushion she was hugging. It looked like she'd been drooling into it heavily for some time. 

"That's Mia," Kennedy said. "King brought her."

"King's here?" I looked around the room but I didn't seem to know anyone here. "I think he was the one who stole my Tom Waits tickets."

"He was here," Kennedy said, "but then he had to go work a party somewhere."

"Took them right out of my wallet."

"And he just left her here," Kennedy went on. "Without telling me. What am I supposed to do with her?"

I looked at Mia. She was wearing cheap camouflage pants and a black hooded sweatshirt, but the Swatch on her wrist looked real. "Is she his girlfriend?" I asked.

"I don't know," Kennedy answered. "I thought so at first, but then she kept going on about her dead boyfriend."

"Dead?"

"Electrocuted. Got zapped by a faulty mike."

"He was a singer?"

"I think so," Kennedy said. "Either that or a roadie. She told me, but I can't remember exactly." He shook his head. "She keeps his ashes on her bedside table."

"Now that's love," I said.

"It's certainly something," Kennedy said. He drained half the Heineken in one swallow, then smacked his lips. "King's always leaving his shit here. It's got to stop."

We watched a trio of women dance in the center of the room for a while. Their clothes were all wet, so they'd stripped down to just pants and bras, but even their skin looked cold and white. "Who are these people?" I asked.

"I have no idea," Kennedy said. "They came with some people from the new job. But everyone I knew left a long time ago." 

We watched the women for a moment longer, and then I said, "What kind of job is this anyway?"

"It's a broker kind of thing," he said.

"What do you know about being a broker?" I asked.

"It's not what you know," he said, "it's what you act like you know."

He finished the Heineken and dropped the bottle to the floor, then he got up and started dancing with the women. They opened their circle just enough that he could get in but they didn't speak to him. He didn't seem to mind. 

I got up and went into the kitchen. The card players were all half-undressed now, a pile of clothes on one side of the table. I tried to find my shoes. They weren't where I had left them. "I think someone took my shoes," I said.

"What exactly are you trying to say?" the man with the dreadlocks asked, looking at me. 

I went back to searching for my shoes in the muddy pile without answering him. I was still looking for them when Kennedy dragged Mia into the kitchen. She was still unconscious. "Do me a favour, man," he said, shoving her at me. "Take her with you."

She was boneless, arms and legs flopping, eyes rolling sightlessly. I pushed her right back. "She's not mine, I don't want her."

"You brought your car, though. You can take her in that."

For the next few seconds we bounced her back and forth between us, the card players watching silently, until her head slammed into my jaw. I caught her in my arms before she hit the floor, but only just. Then Kennedy pushed us out the door, and we fell down the stairs. My head hit the rail, and everything slid to one side for a moment. When it came back, I was lying on the wet ground outside. Far above my head, the moon glowed through the clouds. 

When I sat up, there was wet newspaper clinging to my arms and legs. I tried pulling it off but it only came away in little strips. I pushed myself to my feet and started off toward the street. The woman with the umbrella was still pushing herself back and forth on the swing set, watching me now. I remembered Mia and went back for her. She was lying face down in the muck, still unconscious. Her head rolled like her neck was broken when I picked her up, but her breathing was regular at least. I carried her to my car and dropped her on the hood while I looked for my keys. The rain really came down then, knocking me sideways while I unlocked the doors. I jammed Mia into the passenger seat and covered her with an old blanket I kept in the back. I had no idea what I was going to do with her. 

When I walked around to the driver's side, I noticed an old couple standing a few cars down, watching me. They were wearing dark jogging suits with reflective stripes and shining white running shoes, and their hair was plastered to their heads, like they'd been out in the rain all night. When they saw me looking at them, they slowly jogged away, glancing back over their shoulders every now and then.

I got in the car and started it. "Hotel California" was playing on the radio, and I reached for the tuning knob before I remembered it had broken off last week. I slammed my hand into the radio until it stopped, then sat there for a long moment, watching the windshield fog up from my breath. Our wet clothes made the car smell like some animal.

The clock in the dashboard said it was one in the morning. What were those people doing running in the rain at one in the morning?



I DROVE BLINDLY around the streets for maybe five minutes, shivering and watching my skin turn white from the street lamps. I didn't know where to go.

"Maybe I should just take you to a hospital," I said to Mia. "What do you think of that?" She didn't answer, didn't even move under the blanket.

I looked out the window, at the dark houses surrounding us. We were in a neighbourhood I'd never seen before. Quiet little houses from the fifties, old trees, children's bicycles left in the front yards. No garbage in sight anywhere. I had no idea where I was.

"There must be a hospital around here somewhere," I said.



I STOPPED AT a 7-Eleven for directions. It took forever to get from the car to the doors, the rain beating down on me the whole time like a million tiny fists.

It was as spotless as a commercial inside, everything in neat rows on the shelves, air freshener instead of air. The only sign of life was a thin trail of brownish water leading to the coffeepot. Behind the counter, a man of about forty or so was eating a potato chips and flipping channels on a miniature television set. I saw the same bombing scene I'd seen at Kennedy's place, before he switched it to the end of 2001. 

"I need to find a hospital," I told him, counting out pocket change for a coffee.

"It's not that bad," he said. "All you need is a bandage."

"What are you talking about?" I asked.

He touched his lips and pointed at me but didn't say anything.

I raised a hand to my mouth and watery blood ran down my fingers. There was a small gash in my lower lip. "Jesus," I said. "When did that happen?"

"I wouldn't know," he said, turning back to the television. "But the bandages are in the third aisle, middle top shelf."

"I don't have time for that," I said. "I've got a woman in a coma outside."

He gave me the directions, but only after I paid for the coffee.



THE HOSPITAL'S emergency room smelled like soap. The place was nearly empty when I carried Mia inside, just one couple and their kids sitting in a circle in the corner. The parents glanced up at us, then went back to praying quietly. The kids stared at the floor the whole time.

I dropped Mia into a chair at the nurses' station and waited. Behind the glass wall in front of me, three nurses were talking about their various ex-husbands. It sounded like the same guy to me. I was still waiting for them to figure this out when one of them came over and asked, "What's the problem?"

"No problem," I said. "I just want to drop her off." We both looked at Mia. A string of drool slowly slipped from her chin to her chest.

"Has she been drinking?" the nurse asked.

"I'm not really sure," I said. 

The nurse looked back at me. "You're not really sure? Now what does that mean?"

"I don't know," I said. "I found her. I thought maybe I could leave her here."

"Sure, we'll just have to fill out the paperwork for that," the nurse said. She smiled at the other nurses when she said it, and I couldn't tell if she was joking or not. She had me go through Mia's pockets, but all I could find was a piece of paper with an address written on it. Five Crossings. I couldn't find her ID anywhere.

The nurse entered my name and address on a form, then took us down the hall to another room. What seemed like hours later, an old, red-faced doctor finally came in. He glanced at Mia and then washed his hands in the sink.

"You the father or the boyfriend?" he asked.

"Neither," I said. "I've only just met her." I couldn't take my eyes off the garbage can in the corner. It was full of bloody bandages. I wondered what had gone on in there before we'd arrived.

"She been drinking?" the doctor asked.

"That's what the nurse figured."

He shone a light in Mia's eyes and felt her pulse for a moment. "You have pieces of newspaper stuck all over you," he told me through a yawn.

"Yes, I know that," I said.

"You also have no shoes on," he pointed out.

"I know that, too, thanks."

"Well, she'll probably be all right," he said, dropping Mia's hand. "She just needs to sleep it off. Now let's have a look at that lip and we can get you two on your way."

"I want to leave her here, though," I said.

"You can't do that," he said. "There's really nothing wrong with her."

"But I don't want her."

"This isn't the pound."



IT WAS STILL RAINING when I took Mia back to the car. I dropped her in the passenger seat and sat there for a moment, wondering what to do next. I looked at the piece of paper with the address again, then searched for the map in the glove compartment. I had to sort through a mess of candy wrappers, condoms, Wake-Ups, a bag of chips I couldn't remember buying, and the registration papers - so faded and water-stained I couldn't even read them any more - before I found it. Crossings Street was at the farthest edge of the city, an area I'd never been to before. 

"King had better be there," I told Mia, then started up the car.



WHEN I FINALLY found Crossings Street, it was only a half-built subdivision. A few of the houses were finished, but most were still empty frames. You could have seen the stars through them, if you could actually see the stars anywhere around here. 

Five Crossings was one of the biggest houses I'd ever seen. Two long stories of swirling stone and glass walls rising up out of a muddy lot. Practically a mansion.

I parked the car on the empty street, under a street lamp that kept turning on and off, and carried Mia to the door. I knocked but no one answered. I thought about leaving her on the doorstep. Then I tried the door. It was open. No alarms went off. I stepped inside.
For a moment, I thought I'd walked into a church. It was dark inside, but there was enough light from the street lamp that I could see the place was empty, just one cavernous room after another. But the walls. The walls were covered with giant murals of angels falling from white clouds, toward buildings in ruins beneath them. It was only when I walked into the next room and saw the murals there - Charles Manson, Margaret Thatcher, Burt Reynolds, all dancing together around a bonfire - that I realized it was all spray paint. Graffiti.

I dragged Mia through two living rooms and into the kitchen. There were no appliances in here, just empty spaces in the walls. It didn't look like anybody had ever lived here. There was no sound but our breathing.

I looked out the back window. There was a huge yard but no grass. It was all mud. And there was a large hole that looked as if it might have been made for a pool that had never been put in, or had been put in and taken away.

I found some stairs leading to the second floor and carried Mia up them. All the rooms up here were empty too. I took her into a bedroom bigger than my entire apartment and locked the door behind us.

I lowered Mia to the floor and then lay down beside her. I thought about my stolen Tom Waits tickets again. When Mia started to moan and shiver, I took off her wet sweatshirt. The alternating light from the street lamp made everything look like snapshots. I could see her bra had little kissing Mickey and Minnie Mouse figures all over it. I thought about taking it off as well, but then she sighed and rolled into me, slipped her hand around my waist.

I looked at her a moment longer, then took off my jacket, the inside of which was still more or less dry, and wrapped it around her. I could feel her breath against my chest. I laid my head back on the polished hardwood floor and closed my eyes.



I DREAMED ABOUT my wife, Rachel, there. Only it was more a memory than a dream. We were in another rainstorm, years earlier. We were swimming in this luxury condo's outdoor pool. We'd just been driving by when we saw it. No one was in it. We parked the car and climbed over the fence, took off our clothes. It was sometime past midnight. Sheets of lightning fell from the sky. Rachel stood on the diving board, naked, her arms held up to the sky like she was calling it down. And then an old woman came out onto a balcony above us and shouted, "Get out of here! You don't belong here!"

"Yes, we do," Rachel shouted back. "This is all ours!"

"I've called the police," the old woman said.

"This is where we live," Rachel said. And then she dove in and came to me under the water, pulling me down to her.



I WOKE TO the sounds of glass breaking in the distance and an engine starting up. For a moment I thought my car was being stolen. Then I heard something louder, something collapsing. I got up and went to the window. 

Outside, the rain had finally stopped, and the early morning air had become a thin mist. My car was still there, its windows unbroken. 

The neighbouring houses were nothing but dim, looming shapes. I couldn't see where the sound was coming from, but it kept up. It sounded like tanks were somewhere out there in the mist, roaming the streets, smashing into the houses.

I carried Mia down to the car, my jacket still wrapped around her, and got behind the wheel. My stomach started to growl as the first rays of the sun began to burn holes through the grey. I started the car and drove slowly down the street.

I drove for about a minute or so before I came across the source of the noise. It was a bulldozer, tearing down one of the houses. I stopped the car to watch. It drove into the front wall of the house, smashing its blade through a large picture window. Then it lowered the blade and tore apart the wall underneath the window. The bulldozer reversed across the muddy yard, then drove into another part of the wall a few feet over. 

A flatbed truck and a couple of pickups were parked on the street. Men with white hard hats were drinking coffee from thermoses and watching the bulldozer work. I drove on when they all turned to look at me and Mia.

I kept on driving, past more half-built houses - or half-destroyed, I wasn't sure now - and then a long field bordered by a rusted chain-link fence and filled with bags of garbage. On the other side of the field were more houses, but there were cars in the driveways, and people walked up and down the streets.

I drove until I found a McDonald's. There was a car stalled in the drive-through line, so I parked in the lot and went inside. I ordered an Egg McMuffin and a coffee. When I came back out, Mia was awake and sitting up. 

"Where are we?" she asked, looking around as I got into the car again. 

"I don't know," I said. I cradled the coffee between my legs and started on the Egg McMuffin. The first bite burned my throat all the way down, but I didn't mind.

"Are you a friend of King's?" Mia asked. When I didn't say anything she began to scrape the dried mud from her face with her fingernails, then paused to look down at herself. "Where's my shirt?" she asked.

"It's a long story," I said.

"Did you do something to me while I was passed out?" She sounded more curious than upset. "You could have at least waited for me to wake up."

"I wouldn't touch you," I said.

"Yeah, right." She slid her arms into the sleeves of my jacket, did up the zipper.

"Not when you're in love with that dead guy," I went on.

"You don't know anything about it," she said.

"Oh, I know."

She lifted the Egg McMuffin from my hand, took a bite. "I saw this show on television the other day," she said. "This woman was in a car accident when she was pregnant. The dashboard was pushed into her stomach. The doctors couldn't hear a heartbeat. They told her the baby was dead and said they'd have to abort it."

I tried to take the Egg McMuffin back, but she held it away from me.

"Please," I said.

"But she wouldn't let them take it. She carried it through full-term, even though she thought it was dead. But when it came out, it was alive. She'd brought it back to life, just like that."

"Please," I said again.

"Now that's love."

"Please."



WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR BABY? 
By Peter Darbyshire



THIS IS THE STORY of how I met Rachel.

I was working at one of the hospitals downtown at the time. They needed extras for training and disaster drills and the like. My job was to be a victim.

On my first day, a nurse made me get into a gown and lie on a bed in the hall - all the rooms were full, she said - and then the doctor in charge of the exercise came to see me. He was drinking coffee from a Starbucks mug.

"When the interns come, I want you to hold yourself here," he said, pointing to a spot on my stomach. "Make a lot of noise whenever anyone touches it."

"What's wrong with me?" I asked.

"Oh, it could be any number of things," he said. 

"How about cancer?" I said. "Everybody gets cancer."

"If you like." 

"What exactly are the symptoms?" I asked.

"It doesn't really matter," he said, watching a passing nurse and sipping from his mug.

"But how are they supposed to know what I'm dying from if I don't even know the symptoms?" I asked.

"This isn't that kind of exercise," he said. "You can't actually tell what's wrong with someone just by feeling their stomach."

"Then why are we doing this?" I asked.

"We're not testing them to see if they know what's wrong with you," he said, looking at his watch. "We're testing them to find out if they know the procedure."



I WORKED AT THE HOSPITAL once or twice a week. I was always suffering from some sort of deadly condition - brain tumors, strokes, heart attacks, that kind of thing. I researched them all in the library downtown so I could perform the symptoms properly. It was like I actually was dying. I could have been.

I usually worked the same shifts as Rachel. She specialized in acting out mental disorders. She told me one day that I was one of the best patients she'd ever seen. We were lying in beds across from each other in a room on the children's ward, which was the only floor they had space on that day. "If they gave away Oscars for this business," she said, "you'd have my vote." She was chewing on something that made her mouth froth, and foam was running down her chin. She'd told me earlier that it had something to do with the condition she was supposed to have, but I thought it made her look rabid.

When the doctor brought the interns in, Rachel started to shake and shudder in her bed. She spat more foam out of her mouth and down onto her breasts, rolled her eyes back so I couldn't see anything but white.

The doctor stepped aside and waved in one of the interns, a young man with glasses and a goatee. He bent down beside Rachel and slipped his finger into her mouth. "Her airway seems to be clear," he said to the doctor, but that was all he managed because then he was swearing as Rachel bit his finger. 

"That's why it's best to use pens to check airways," the doctor said as the intern clutched his hand to his chest. "Not the plastic ones, though. They can bite them in half, and then you get ink everywhere." 

The next intern took a step toward the bed but then stopped as Rachel threw back her head and let out a long scream. It was so loud I actually had to cover my ears with my hands. The interns all looked at each other, but none of them stepped any closer. Then Rachel curled up into the fetal position and began to shake. She did that for a few seconds, then unrolled her eyes and winked at me.

How could I not fall in love with her?



SOMETIMES I DID my research at the hospital. I went around the wards and watched patients in their rooms or in the hallways, wherever I could find someone who had a condition I wanted to learn about. I was in there at all hours of the day, but the nurses didn't seem to mind. It was like I was a real patient. Some of them even commented on my acting.

"You're not dragging your legs enough," one of them told me when I was practicing my MS walk with some crutches I'd borrowed from a supply closet.

"Try taking off your clothes," another one said when I was sitting in the waiting room, working on my Alzheimer's look. "They like to take off their clothes when there are nurses around."

Even some of the patients gave me advice. A man who'd lost his legs in some sort of industrial press accident taught me how to use a wheelchair like I'd been in it for years. We spent the entire night racing up and down one of the halls, until I crushed the air hose of a woman on oxygen who'd come out of her room to complain about the noise. The nurses wouldn't let me back onto that floor for a week, and when I came back, the man in the wheelchair was gone.

Once, the nurses left a dead man on a bed in the intensive care hallway because they were too busy to take him down to the morgue. Someone was having a heart attack or something like that in the room at the end of the hall, so they were all in there. I lay down on an empty bed across from the dead man and studied him for a while, then tried to make myself look like him. He'd been left with his eyes open, so I stared at the ceiling for as long as I could without blinking, tried not to move at all. I only breathed when I absolutely had to. I could actually feel my heartbeat slow down. I wondered if this was what meditation was like.

One of the nurses came out of the room at the end of the hall and rolled the dead man and his bed into the elevator. I stayed where I was, not moving. A few minutes later, another nurse came out of the room and started pushing my bed toward the elevator. She screamed and jumped away from the bed when I sat up.

"Did I have you fooled?" I asked. 

"I thought you were that dead guy," she said.

"Thank you," I said.



SOMETIMES, WHEN RACHEL and I were waiting for our shift to start, we'd get coffees from the cafeteria and wander around the hospital. We liked to make up stories about what was wrong with the people in the rooms we passed.

"Flesh-eating disease," I said of a man whose entire body was covered in bandages. "The nurses are afraid to touch him."

"Cancer," Rachel said when we went past a room with a woman on a lung machine. "But she never smoked a cigarette in her life."

"Attempted suicide," I said of a young woman who sat in a wheelchair by a window, drooling. "She took all the pills in her apartment when her boyfriend left."

"Self-inflicted gunshot," Rachel said of the same woman. "There was no boyfriend."

Rachel liked the intensive care ward the best. This is where they kept all the critically injured people, and we were only allowed in there during visiting hours. Most of the people in here were young, and many of them were dying from wounds they'd sustained in accidents and that sort of thing. They had a whole other wing for people who were dying of old age or disease.

"Imagine," Rachel said as we walked through here one day, "the lives of all these people are still going on."

I looked into a room at a man who appeared to be in a coma. He'd been asleep for as long as I'd worked at the hospital, and there were tubes going into both his arms. "I don't know about that," I said.

"I don't mean in here," Rachel said. "I mean outside. All these people have lives waiting for them out there. They have family, jobs, houses, cars, money, everything you can think of, just waiting for these people to get better and come back."

"But some of them aren't going to get better," I pointed out.

"Imagine if you could take their place," she said. "Just step into their lives and take over from them."

"I think there are laws against that sort of thing," I said.

"You could be anybody you wanted to be."



ON ONE OF OUR WALKS, Rachel and I found ourselves in the part of the hospital where they keep the babies. There was a room full of them on the other side of a glass wall, each one in its little incubator. Nurses wandered around the room, making sure they were all right. The babies closest to the glass waved their arms and feet at us.

"It's like we're their parents or something," Rachel said.

"But we're not," I pointed out.

"If it wasn't for the nurses, we could just probably take them and go, and they'd never know the difference."

"There are easier ways of getting children," I said.

"Are there?"

We watched as a nurse lifted one of the babies from its incubator and took it into a back room. There was a woman in a bathrobe sitting in a wheelchair back there, and before the door closed, we saw her hold out her arms for the baby.

"What do you think we'd be like if we were the parents of some of these kids?" Rachel asked.

"What do you mean?" I said.

She pointed at the nearest baby, a dark-haired thing with a face that looked as if it had been pushed down with sandpaper. "Who would we be if we were this kid's parents?"

I looked at the baby for a moment. "I'd be a lawyer," I finally said. "Corporate. You'd be ..."

"An accountant," she said. "We'd have a big condo downtown."

"And two cars," I said. "New ones."

"And a cottage on a lake somewhere," she said.

"And we'd vacation in the Caribbean every winter," I said.

She pointed out a baby that wouldn't stop crying. "What about that one?" 

"With lungs like that," I said, "I'd have to be some sort of musician. Maybe even a rock star."

"I'd be your manager," she said. "We started out working together, and then we fell in love."

"On a tour of Europe," I said.

"We live in an estate outside the city," she said. 

"I have gold albums and everything."

"We have maids and people who do our lawns."

"And more money than we can ever spend."

Rachel pointed to a baby at the back of the room. This one was tiny, half the size of the others, and it was in a different kind of incubator, one that was all enclosed in glass and had tubes running into it from machines. The nurses checked on this baby every few minutes, and they stopped smiling whenever they did.

"What about that one?" Rachel asked. "Who would we be if we were that baby's parents?"

"I'd be worried," I said.



I WAS ACTING OUT so many deadly diseases and conditions that I couldn't even tell when I was acting and when I was really sick. Once, I woke with what I thought was a real pain in my stomach. I'd been researching stomach cancer that week, and I knew all about the low survival rate, so I mentioned it to the doctor in charge of the training exercises when I went in that afternoon. 

"I don't know," she said, "I was planning to test them on head injuries today."

"But I think this is a real pain," I said.

"Are you sure it isn't in your head?" she asked me.

When she brought the interns in, the first one shone a light in my eyes. "Are you feeling any pain or nausea?" he asked. The question was directed at me, but he was looking at the doctor. 

"I have a pain in my stomach," I said.

"You mean your head," he said.

"No," I said, "it's in my stomach."

He looked at the doctor. "I thought we were doing head injuries today."

"But I'm not acting," I said. "I'm really in pain."

"I didn't study for abdominal pains," he went on. "This isn't fair." One of the other interns laughed.

The doctor checked her watch. "Let's move on," she suggested.

"But I think there's something really wrong with me," I said.



THE NEXT TIME we went back to the room with all the babies, the sick baby was still in its incubator with all the tubes hooked up to machines. It didn't look any bigger, and it didn't cry or wave its arms and legs like the other babies. It just lay there, looking up at the fluorescent lights overhead.

"Do you think it's going to live?" Rachel asked.

"I don't know," I said.

"Where are its parents?" Rachel asked, looking around. "What it needs are parents."

"Maybe they're sick too," I said. "Maybe they're in their own special incubators somewhere."

Rachel looked at me, then back at the baby. 

"It'll grow if it thinks it has parents," she said. "It just needs to feel loved."

"Well, what can you do," I said.

"We'll be its parents," she said. She tapped on the glass. "Hello, baby," she said.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Wave to baby," she told me. She kept on tapping the glass, and the baby looked in our direction, as did one of the nurses.

"That's not our baby," I said.

"It doesn't know that," Rachel said. "It's still young enough that maybe it'll imprint on us."

"It's not a chicken," I said.

"Wave to baby," she said, "or it'll think you don't care."

I looked at the baby. It stared back at me, unmoving except for its shallow breaths. I lifted a hand and waved.



A FEW MONTHS after I started working as a victim, a pharmaceutical company hired Rachel and me for some drug trials. It took place in an old wing of the hospital that wasn't used any more. The hospital had sealed off the wing because it had been scheduled for demolition and rebuilding, but then the funds for the project had been cut off, and the wing had been left to collect dust, until they moved us in there.

There were maybe a dozen of us in total, all in one big room so the doctors could keep an eye on us. We lay in beds along the walls and watched a television they'd put in the middle of the room. All it played was commercials. Some of the others were normal people like me and Rachel, but some were actually sick. The guy in the bed beside me told me he was dying of cancer.

"Shouldn't you be in another ward then?" I asked him.

"They can't do anything about it," he said. "It's in my head. They'd have to cut out most of my brain to get at it. Then where would I be?"

"Is that a rhetorical question?" I asked.

"I'm hoping maybe these new drugs might do something," he said, but then he sighed and shook his head.

The trial ran for the weekend, and they gave us pills every four hours. They even woke us up if we were sleeping to make sure we took them. The pills all looked the same, tiny and blue, but the doctor in charge said that some of them were placebos.

"Please don't give me any of those," the man beside me said. "That's the last thing I need."

"I'll take his placebos if he doesn't want them," I said.

"That's not the way it works," the doctor said. "It's all random."

"Don't I know that," the man beside me said.

The water had been turned off in this part of the hospital, so we had to go back to one of the other wings if we wanted to use the washroom. One of the women in our group needed help walking there because the drugs she took made her fall down, and another guy lost control of his bowels in his bed, but I figured they were giving me placebos because there was nothing wrong with me.

But when I went to the washroom, I couldn't find my way back. I wandered the halls of the closed-down wing for what seemed like hours before I finally gave up. I lay down on the floor of one of the empty rooms and tried to go to sleep.

As soon as I closed my eyes, though, all the commercials that I'd watched on that television in the ward room started playing in my head. Only now Rachel and I were in them. We drove down a coastal highway in a gleaming new car, we met each other's eyes across a crowded bar and I slid a drink down the counter to her, we played one-on-one basketball against each other in a dark alleyway. I still don't know if it was all caused by the drugs or just a dream.

One of the security guards found me around dawn. He shone a flashlight in my eyes and kept it there even after I'd stood up. "We've been looking all over for you," he said. "We even checked the morgue downstairs."

"What would I be doing in the morgue?" I asked him.

"What are you doing here?" he asked, looking around the empty room.

When he took me back to the room where I was supposed to be, Rachel was just waking up. 

"Where were you?" she asked me. 

"I went to the washroom," I told her, climbing back into bed.

"I had this dream," she said, shaking her head. "We were living together."

"I want your drugs," I said.



RACHEL AND I STARTED checking on our baby whenever we were in the hospital. We'd stand on the other side of the glass and wave and smile and make faces. Once, Rachel even bought a silver helium balloon from the hospital's gift shop. It said Get Well Soon on one side, and the nurses tied it to one of the incubator's hoses. The baby waved its arms.

"Look," Rachel said. "It's like baby's trying to reach it."

"It's getting better," I said. I put my arm around her.

She didn't take her eyes off the baby. "It really is," she said.

Our baby grew stronger with each passing day. Soon it was waving its arms and legs together, and once I thought it even smiled at us, although Rachel thought it was just gas.

"I think it's going to live," I told her one day.

"But what kind of life is it going to have?" she asked. "That's the question."

"It's going to be an athlete," I said. "It's going to overcome all the odds and go on to become one of those success stories you see on television."

"I'll be happy as long as it's not in a wheelchair or anything like that for the rest of its life," she said. "I couldn't stand it if it was crippled."

"Even then, it'd still be a hero," I said. "Like that guy who rode his wheelchair all around the world."

"Imagine that," Rachel said, tapping her fingers on the glass. "Our baby, a hero."



BUT ONE DAY we showed up and our baby was gone. The special incubator was empty, and now the nurses didn't even look at it. The helium balloon was still attached to the hose, but it hung half-deflated in the air.

"Oh no," Rachel said, putting her hands over her mouth. "What's happened?"

"Hey," I said, pounding on the glass to get the nurses' attention. "What have you done?"

All the other babies started to cry at the noise, and one of the nurses waved at me to stop.

"Oh oh oh," Rachel said, staring at the empty incubator.

"It's okay," I said. "Don't worry, it's all right." I didn't know what else to do, so I pounded on the glass some more.

One of the nurses came through the door that led into the room. "Who do you think you are," she said, "upsetting the babies like that?"

"What happened to it?" Rachel asked. She put her arms around me, and I held her. "Is it all right?"

"What happened to what?" the nurse asked.

"What happened to our baby?" I said.



THE LAST TIME I worked as a victim was when the hospital staged a disaster simulation. It took place in the parking lot of a mall, on a Sunday morning. There were twenty of us, all made up with different injuries by professional makeup crews. We sat on the asphalt while they painted wounds on us. I asked for a bullet in the chest, but the woman who worked on me said it wasn't that kind of disaster. "It's an explosion of some sort," she said. "With toxic gas and all that." She did something to my head that made it look all burned and black, then ripped the top of my shirt open.

"Am I getting reimbursed for that?" I asked.

"Do you think you can vomit?" she asked, rubbing fake blood into my chest. Her hands were warm and strong, like a masseuse's. "We don't have any of the simulated vomit left, and they wanted everyone throwing up from the gas."

"What kind of gas is this anyway?" I asked. 

"I don't know," she said. "All they said was gas."

"I don't think I can vomit," I said. "Maybe I should just take off my shirt and you can put blood all over me instead."

"I think we're about done here," she said. She turned to Rachel and worked on her for a while, giving her a slashed throat and covering one of her eyes with melted skin.

"How do I look?" Rachel asked me when the makeup woman was done.

"Perfect," I told her.

The hospital had hired a professional film director, a man by the name of Eden, to stage the event. He listed off all the films he'd worked on, but I'd never heard of any of them. He arranged us around a burned-out tanker truck they'd parked in one corner of the lot. 

"This was in a real accident," he told us. "Two or three people got killed. So try to play off that, uh, realistic feeling."

Rachel put up her hand. "What do you mean, 'two or three'?" she asked.

"The fire department guys told me two bystanders died when it blew," Eden said, "but they never found the driver, so they're not sure what happened to him."

I looked at the cab of the truck. It was all melted, the metal fused together so tightly you couldn't see inside it. I wondered if the driver was still in there. 

Eden spread us out around the truck and told us to lie down until the ambulances arrived. He walked among us, adjusting people's limbs and telling us to show more pain, that sort of thing. A couple of times he stopped and looked at the scene through a little lens hanging from his neck.

"All right," he said, when he was done, "I'm going to call the ambulances now. Try to stay in character when they get here."

Beside me, Rachel lay back and looked up at the sky, practised her moaning. 

Eden walked over to the snacks table and grabbed a gasoline container from underneath it. He took it over to the burned-out truck and poured gas all over the hood and the cab. Then he tossed the can aside and took a lighter from his pocket, lit the truck on fire.

Rachel stopped her moaning and looked up. "There's no gas left in the truck, is there?" she asked.

"Are there going to be fire trucks too?" I called out, but Eden shook his head.

"No, this is just for, uh, effect," he said. "I thought it would make things look more real."

"He thought?" Rachel said, watching the smoke from the fire rise up into the sky. "Does the hospital know about this?"

"So no one's going to put out the fire?" I asked.

Eden didn't answer, though, because he was talking into his cell phone now. "Everybody's in places here," he said. "We're ready for the take."

I looked around the parking lot. People were pulling into parking spots around our taped-in area and getting out of their cars, wandering into the mall. Some of them looked our way, but no one actually stopped. 

Eden frowned as he put away his phone. "Attention, people," he shouted. "There's been a delay. It seems there's been a real disaster in a chemical plant on the other side of the city, and our ambulances got sent there by mistake. They thought it was the exercise." People around Rachel and me groaned, but Eden held up his hands. "I want you all to stay in position," he said. "They're going to come for us as soon as they realize the mistake."

We lay there for a while longer, until the sun was almost directly overhead. I began to sweat, but I stayed in place. The smoke from the fire drifted down over us, and everyone began to cough.

"What if they don't realize it's a mistake?" Rachel wondered after maybe half an hour of this. "What if they think that other disaster is really the exercise all along?"

"Well, they'd better figure it out soon," I said, "because my makeup is starting to melt." 

Just then we heard the sirens. "Thank God," Eden said and turned in the direction of the mall entrance. But it wasn't ambulances that drove in, it was fire trucks. 

"No no no," Eden said.

There were three fire trucks in total, two regular ones and one of those smaller kind that the paramedics drive. They wound their way through the parking lot, honking their horns at the people going in and out of the mall as they tried to find their way to us. They had to circle around us once before they discovered a path through the parked cars. They drove into the exercise area, the lead truck going through the tape as it did so.

"Hey," Eden shouted, running at the truck. "You're breaking the scene integrity."

The trucks stopped, and firemen in full gear climbed out. One of them pushed Eden out of the way and started shouting at a group of others who were unrolling a hose. He pointed at the truck, which was still burning, and they dragged the hose toward it.

"I thought this was an exercise for the ambulance staff," I said to Rachel. 

She shrugged. "As long as we get paid," she said. She closed her eyes and started to moan again.

The firemen turned on the hose and began spraying the truck. "No!" Eden cried and put his hands in the air. And now other firemen were kneeling beside the closest victims, looking at their fake wounds and reaching into their first aid kits. 

"I don't think these guys know this is an exercise," I said. 

Rachel opened her eyes and watched the firemen for a moment. Another group had unrolled a second hose and they began spraying water on the victims closest to the truck. The makeup melted away under the water, and Eden screamed and threw himself in the way. 

"Someone else must have called them," Rachel said. 

"So should we be playing our parts or not?" I wondered.

"We'd better ask Eden," Rachel said.

"Do you really think we should break the scene?" I asked.

But she was already on her feet and walking over to Eden, so I got up and followed her.

Eden was on his knees when we reached him, staring at the firemen as they started loading people onto stretchers. He held his hands clasped to his chest, like he was praying. There were more sirens in the distance now.

"What should we do?" I asked him.

"Are we still getting paid for this?" Rachel asked at the same time.

"Hospital," Eden said, only it came out more like a gasp.

"What about it?" I asked.

"Take me," he said, making that same gasping noise.

It was only then I realized that he wasn't praying, he was holding his chest. "I think he's having a heart attack," I said to Rachel.

Eden nodded and caught my hand with one of his. "Hospital," he said again. "Take me."

"I don't think so," I said, trying to push his hand off mine. "They'll take care of you here."

"Help," Rachel called, waving her arms at the firemen. "We need some help here." But none of them looked at us, because they were all busy with the other victims.

"Please," Eden said, squeezing my hand just a little.

"We're victims, not ..." I didn't know how to finish.

"I'll pay you," Eden gasped.



WE DRAGGED EDEN through the parking lot, to my car. "How much exactly are we getting paid for this?" I wanted to know as we drove around, looking for an exit.

"Hundred bucks," Eden gasped.

"Each?" I asked.

He shook his head. "Only have hundred," he managed.

"A hundred bucks to save your life?" I shook my head.

"And we're still getting paid for the exercise, too, right?" Rachel asked.

Eden didn't answer, just turned his head and looked out the window at the last bit of smoke rising from the truck. "Would have been perfect," he sighed.

We found the way out and went down the street in the direction of the hospital. More fire trucks drove past us, and I could hear sirens in all directions.

"This is really not a professionally run operation," Rachel said.

"Maybe we should start a union or something," I said.

"Maybe we should look for another job," she said.

"What would we do?" I asked.

"Something with benefits," she said. "In case we ever really get sick."

When we turned into the hospital entrance, I started to head for the parking lot, but Eden stopped me.

"Hey," he moaned from the back seat. "Emergency!"

"But I can't park in Emergency," I said. "It's just for ambulances and stuff."

"Emergency," Eden said again.

"I think you can park long enough to bring someone inside," Rachel said. "You just can't leave it there."

"All right," I said, "but I better not get towed."

None of that mattered, though, because as I drove into the Emergency area, I collided head-on with an ambulance coming the other way. 

In the second before we hit, the ambulance driver and I stared at each other through our windshields. He opened his mouth to say something. Rachel screamed. Then the steering wheel came up and hit me in the face, and I couldn't open my eyes for a while.

When I finally managed to force them open once more, I saw Eden staggering through the Emergency doors. In the ambulance, the driver was slumped back in his seat, unconscious or dead, I couldn't tell. The other paramedic was standing in the rear of the ambulance, holding his head with one hand and the inside wall of the ambulance with the other.

"We'd better get out of here," I said, but when I looked over at Rachel, I saw that she was injured too. She was slumped back in her seat, and the windshield was cracked from where her head had hit it.

"Help!" I called out. I tried to undo my seat belt, but it was stuck. "Help!" I called again, this time to the paramedic who was conscious. He was out of the ambulance and stumbling around to the front of the vehicle now. He looked my way, then opened the driver's side door of the ambulance and dragged out the other paramedic. I pounded on the horn, but he didn't look back as he carried the other man through the Emergency doors.

I looked at Rachel again. I couldn't even see if she was still breathing or not. "Don't worry," I said. "I won't let you go." I leaned across as best I could with the seat belt holding me back, and I pinched her nostrils shut, blew air into her mouth. "I'll keep you alive until someone can save you," I told her. I kept it up until the nurses came out and took her away from me.

That was the first time we kissed.




JESUS CURED MY HERPES 
By Peter Darbyshire



AFTER I GOT KICKED OUT of The Code, I started driving out to the airport at night to watch the planes take off. I'd find an empty side street and sit on the hood of my car for hours. Sometimes the planes passed right over me, so low I could almost touch them. You could watch them for several minutes before they disappeared into the clouds overhead. There were always clouds over the airport.

There were other people out there who watched the planes, too. Most just parked on the street like me, but there was one group of men that met in front of a twenty-four hour garage. They were always there whenever I drove past, no matter what time of night. Five or six of them sitting in a circle of lawn chairs at the edge of the garage's parking lot, staring up at the sky and drinking beer from cans. 

Once, I parked behind their row of trucks and wandered over to the edge of their circle. "Mind if I join you?" I asked. They all looked at me for a moment and then made noises like this was okay with them. One of them reached into a cooler at his feet and pulled out a beer, tossed it to me. 

They didn't say anything at all as they waited for the next plane to pass, just kept staring up at the empty sky. I looked over at the garage. The doors were open, and inside I could see two men in grease-stained overalls bent over the engine of a car. One man would touch a part of the engine and shake his head, then the other man would do the same with another part of the engine. In the doorway of the garage, a woman was talking on a cell phone. "You don't understand," I heard her say, "I'm stuck here. I can't go anywhere."

A plane passed a couple of hundred feet over us just then. Over the noise of its engines, the man beside me shouted, "DC-10. Series 10. General Electric CF6-6 engines. 40,000 pounds takeoff thrust. Two hundred and fifty passengers, three cockpit crew. First flight made in 1970." The other men nodded and lifted their beer cans to their lips. Nobody said anything else until the next plane came. Then the man next to the first one who had spoken said, "737. 800 model. General Electric CFM56-7B engines. 27,300 pounds thrust. 189 passengers. First launched in 1965." They all nodded again and drank some more. 

One of the mechanics got behind the wheel of the car and tried to start it up. The engine turned over and over but didn't catch. The other mechanic looked at the woman and shook his head. "I don't even know where I am," she shouted into her phone.

The men went around the circle until it was my turn. When the next plane passed overhead, they all looked at me. I looked up at the plane. "United Airlines," I said. "Probably going to New York." They kept staring at me until the next plane came, but even then they didn't say anything. They didn't speak again the whole time I was there, and they didn't offer me another beer after I finished the first one.

In the garage, one of the mechanics closed the hood of the car. The other one went over to a coffeemaker in the corner and poured himself a cup. The woman put her cell phone in her purse and looked up and down the street. Then she went over to the car and sat behind the wheel, started turning over the engine herself. It made a slow grinding noise, like the engine was tearing itself apart underneath the hood. I could hear it all the way back to my car.



AND ONCE I SAW a plane struck by lightning. It was only a hundred feet or so off the ground when the lightning hit it, so quickly that all I really saw was the afterimage. There were two bolts - one came down from the clouds, while the other rose up from the wet ground - and they met somewhere in the fuselage. I couldn't see anything but white for a moment because of the lightning, but I felt the vibration from the thunder where I sat on the car. 

I waited for the plane to fall from the sky but it didn't. Instead, it kept on rising into the sky, until it disappeared in the clouds. It was as if the lightning had never happened, or I had imagined it. For a moment I thought that perhaps everyone on board was dead, that the lightning had electrocuted them all in their seats, and that the plane was flying on its own now. I had a vision of it continuing to rise up into the sky, perhaps all the way out of the atmosphere and into orbit, everyone inside melted into their seats. 

When I went home later that night, I turned on the television and watched for any stories about the plane. There was nothing, though, just a few brief sound bites about the salvage operation of a different plane that had gone down in the ocean a few days earlier. Nothing at all about any planes being struck by lightning. It was as if I were the only person in the world who even knew it had happened.



ANOTHER TIME I STOPPED at a twenty-four-hour coffee shop by the airport. It was surrounded by overgrown grass fields, and empty coffee cups and plastic bags filled the ditches at the side of the road. There was a tractor trailer with a cargo of live cows in the parking lot. A couple of them turned their heads to look at me through the slats of the trailer as I went inside, but the others just kept on staring at each other.

The driver of the truck was inside, looking at a road map spread out across the counter. He was following lines on it with a yellowed finger and shaking his head. "I just have no idea how I got here," he kept saying to the woman behind the counter, who wasn't paying him any attention at all.

I sat down with a coffee by the window, where I could still see the lights of the planes taking off from one of the runways. Every now and then one of the cows outside made a long, low noise, like the sound of a car horn slowed down. The truck driver pushed his hat around on his head each time he heard the noise, but he didn't look up from the map.

After a while, two women and a man all wearing the same kind of T-shirt came in. The T-shirt was black with the word BLESSING in red across their breasts. I watched their reflections in the glass as they went up to the counter.

"Last night I started shaking all over in bed," one of the women was saying. "It went on for ten minutes. I know because I was looking right at the clock the whole time. But I couldn't stop it."

"I had that electrical feeling myself," the other woman said. "You know, all the hair on my body was standing on end."

"It was like someone else had taken me over."

"It actually gave my cat a shock when he came over to see what was going on. He ran into the other room and wouldn't come near me all day today."

"I never felt a thing," the man said. "Haven't for a long time." He was going bald, and the whole time they were in there he kept pushing the hair he had over the bald spot.

"Stanley tried to climb on top of me during the middle of it," the first woman said, shaking her head. "He pretended he was in a rapture and couldn't control himself." 

"That man," the other woman laughed.

The first woman bought an eclair and bit off one end, began sucking the cream out from inside. "But don't you worry," she said through a mouthful of cream, "I put a stop to that soon enough."

"I'd like to feel it again," the man said, frowning into his coffee. "Just one more time."

Both women laid their hands on him. "Maybe tonight."

"Yes, maybe tonight." 

"Maybe," the man said, but he kept on staring into his coffee.

"Jesus Christ," the truck driver said, slamming his hand down on the map. "This doesn't make any sense at all." He stared out at his truck and sighed.

The people in the T-shirts looked away from him and didn't say anything else until they were on their way out. One of the women stopped at my table and bent over me. "I saw you watching us," she said.

"I wasn't," I told her.

"Would you like to talk about God?" she asked me.

"I don't think so," I said.

"Well, would you like to see him then?"



I WENT OUT with them to their car. The cows were pushing against each other in the back of the truck now, rocking the trailer from side to side. The woman who'd spoken to me said, "They feel it too."

"Feel what?" I asked.

"You'll see," she said, and for some reason the others laughed.

I left my car in the lot and got in the back of theirs, along with the man, who introduced himself as Hank. The woman who'd talked to me first said her name was Helen. The other woman, the driver, never introduced herself at all.

We went about a mile or so down the street, to a building that looked as if it had once been a warehouse, or maybe a factory. The parking lot was already full of cars, and the front doors of the place were wide open, lighting up a crowd of people standing outside. "Looks like the non-believers are out again tonight," Hank said.

"Atheists?" I asked, looking at the crowd. They held signs in their hands and were shouting at everyone that went inside.

"Oh no, they're Christians," he said.

"I thought you were the Christians."

"We are," he said. 

"I don't understand," I told him.

"They're just jealous," Helen said from the front seat. "The Lord doesn't touch them like he touches us." 

"I'm not so sure about this," I told them, but I got out of the car and followed them to the building anyway.

The people outside all wore the same kind of T-shirt, too, but this one was white with a red cross on the front. Other than that, these people didn't look any different from the people I was with. Their signs said things like JESUS DIED FOR YOUR SINS, NOT YOUR SEX and GOD DOESN'T BARK. "Satan!" they shouted at us as we approached. "Satan! Satan! Satan!" And one of them, a woman who looked a little like my dead grandmother, sprayed me with a Windex bottle. 

"Hey hey hey," I said, but Hank took me by the arm and guided me through the doors. "Don't worry about it," he said. "It's only holy water."

"Do that again and I'll press charges," I shouted back at her over my shoulder.

The inside of the building was a large room filled with folding metal chairs. They were spread out in loose rows, with plenty of room between the rows and with a large aisle running down the middle of the room. The aisle ended in a large open area on the other side of the room, over which a giant wooden crucifix and carved Christ hung from the wall. Christ's body was all contorted, like he was having a seizure, and he looked like he was laughing or screaming, I couldn't tell which.

We sat at the back of the room, because most of the seats were already taken. There were other people wearing the BLESSING T-shirt here, but most were dressed in normal clothes or what I imagined passed for normal clothes with this crowd. Everyone was smiling and talking to the people around them. It looked like the sort of religious rally you see on television, but I'd always thought those things were staged.

"Good turnout," said the woman whose name I still didn't know. "God must have called a lot of people."

"It's going to be a special night," Helen said, nodding her head.

Hank didn't say anything at all, just stared at the Christ hanging over the stage.

After some time, a couple of the men in the audience got up and closed the doors. I heard one last "Satan!" from outside. Everyone seemed to stop talking and look at the Christ at the same time.

I could hear my own breathing, my heartbeat in my ears. Then the women around me began murmuring softly, too low for me to catch the words. Soon everyone in the crowd seemed to be talking softly to themselves, even Hank - everyone but me, that is. I kept waiting for something else to happen. I was getting hungry.

Then a woman stood up in the middle of the room, knocking her chair to the ground. "Jesus cured my herpes!" she shrieked. She pushed her way to the end of her row and ran down the aisle. Once she was underneath the Christ on the wall, she fell to the ground and started rolling around on the carpet, still shrieking the same words over and over. "Jesus cured my herpes! Jesus cured my herpes!"

I looked around the room, but nobody else seemed to be paying much attention to this. A pair of older ladies near me were even smiling and nodding at the woman rolling around on the ground.

A man in a suit near the front stood up and shouted, "Jesus turned my cavities into gold teeth!" He fell to his knees and started kissing the carpet. There were murmurs of "Hallelujah" and "Amen" from the crowd. A few rows in front of us, another man, this one in a post-office uniform, stood up and started weeping loudly.

"I think I'm going to leave," I said, but Hank put his hand on my leg. "Not yet," he said. "Not until you feel it."

"Feel what?" I asked.

"Just wait," he said. He didn't take his hand off my leg.

The murmuring in the crowd grew louder, and now I could hear some of what the people around me were saying. "Please, God, take me," a woman sitting directly in front of me whispered. "Just one more year," a man a few chairs down said. "Make it stop eating me," someone behind me said. 

Then, as if on cue, a dozen or so people scattered around the room all stood up at once and began shrieking gibberish at the people around them. They acted as if they were saying things that made sense, but I couldn't understand a word of it. The entire front row of people fell to the floor and started convulsing there, as if they were all having simultaneous fits. 

I watched it spread through the crowd, like some sort of virus. People ran hollering to the front of the room, where they fell to the ground and barked like dogs. Others writhed up and down the aisle like snakes. A man tore open his shirt, and the woman sitting beside him began kissing his breast, pecking at it like a bird. The air filled with screams and cries and hysterical laughter. 

Beside me, Helen began laughing and fell to the floor. She caught hold of one of my pant legs with a hand and tried to pull me down after her, but I hung on to the chair. A few seconds later, Hank slowly slid off his chair, then started shaking and convulsing on the ground. His hand was still on my other leg, stroking up and down it. I kept pushing it away, but he kept putting it back. All around us, people were falling to the floor, touching each other all over, screaming hysterically.

Then the woman whose name I didn't know laid her hands on either side of my head and kissed me on the lips. I could taste the cream from the eclair, could smell her perfume. I went to push her away, but it was too late. It was as if someone else had taken control of my body. 

I fell to the floor and felt myself shaking, flopping around like I'd been Tazered. My hands were everywhere on Helen and Hank's bodies, their hands everywhere on mine. The woman whose name I didn't know crowed like a rooster. I tried to scream but could only manage a long sigh. My whole body was burning.

Later, when I was away from that place and back in my car, I passed off what happened there as some sort of crowd hysteria. I'd read about that sort of thing before, how a few people in a crowd could cause everyone else to act the same way. It wasn't God, I decided, but some sort of psychological thing. Or maybe some sort of chemical pumped in through the air vents. Whichever. The important thing was it didn't last.

At some point during the night - it could have been hours or minutes after I fell to the floor, I couldn't tell - the protestors from outside opened the doors and ran in. They started spraying the people closest to the doors with their Windex bottles, all the while shouting, "Get thee hence, Satan!" and "In the name of God I evict thee!" 

None of the holy water actually reached me, but once the doors to outside were open, I suddenly had control of my body again. I got up and ran for the doors. Hank reached after me, howling, but I kicked him away. A protestor waved a sign at me - something about one of the passages in Luke - and I pushed her to the ground, stumbled outside. 

It was raining out now, but I didn't care. I kept running, through the parking lot and down the road, back to the coffee shop. Once a car came from the direction of the church or whatever it was, and I hid in the grass at the side of the road, burying myself in the plastic bags there. For a while, I could still hear screams and laughter from behind me, even through the rain. My body was still burning from whatever it was that had happened in the church, but it faded a little more with the sound of each plane that passed overhead.

I never felt that way again in my life.



I SAW THE FIRST of the cows about fifty feet or so from the coffee shop. It was lying in the middle of the road, bellowing loudly. All four of its legs looked to be broken. It swung its head wildly at me, so I walked along the shoulder until I was past it. 

There were two more in the coffee shop's parking lot. One lay just at the entrance to the drive-through. It was dead, its neck broken, head twisted around to lie along the top of its own spine. The other one was lying on the ground behind my car. There didn't seem to be anything wrong with it - it turned its head to look at me as I walked up - but it was blocking my way out of there.

The truck that had been carrying the cows was parked about a hundred feet away from the coffee shop. The back door of the trailer hung brokenly from its hinges, and I could see it was empty inside now. The cows were everywhere, more lying on the asphalt, others wandering up and down the road or grazing on the grass at the side.

The truck driver was standing by the rear of his truck and talking to the woman from the coffee shop as I walked up. "It's the damnedest thing I ever saw," he said, running his hand over the broken door. "They just started going crazy in there. For a moment, I thought they were going to tip the trailer. But then they busted out the back." He pushed his cap up and down on his head. "Bolt in the door must have rusted right through."

"Well, you can't just leave them here," the woman said. "It's bad for business."

"That's right," I said. "One of those cows is blocking my car."

We all watched one of the cows piss on the road for a moment, and then the woman said, "You'll have to round them up."

"And how am I supposed to do that?" the truck driver said. "Without getting trampled to death, that is."

"How'd you get them in the first time?" she asked.

"That's not my job," he said, shaking his head. "They've got special places for that."

"We could herd them with my car," I said, "if we can move the cow behind it."

They both looked at me for a moment, and then the truck driver said, "No, there's a very definite policy for moments like this." He went up to the cab of the truck and came back with a rifle. "How'd you like to make fifty bucks?" he asked me.

"That all depends," I said.

He waited until a plane was passing overhead, then shot the cow that had pissed on the road. It fell to the ground without making a noise and shook there for a moment. Several of the grazing cows looked over their shoulders at us and then moved a few feet deeper into the grass. For some reason, steam was rising from their hides now.

"I'm going to need help dragging them back into the truck," he said, chambering another round. "I can't move them on my own."

"I don't know," I said.

"Make it a hundred then," he said. "But that's all I've got on me."

"I'm going back inside," the woman said. "I've got to make fresh coffee."

"I could sure use another coffee now," the truck driver said. Another plane passed over us, and he shot one of the cows lying on the road. This one had a single broken leg. It tried to get up as the driver approached but it couldn't stand. Its eyes rolled wildly as he put the gun against its head and pulled the trigger.

He'd killed three more cows by the time the woman came out with coffee for each of us. "It's fresh," she said, "and on the house." She looked around at the dead cows and shook her head. "Given the circumstances and all."

We stood there for a moment, blowing steam from our coffee. Then the truck driver sighed. "I'm never going to make that deadline now." 

He shot one of the grazing cows square in the head, but this one didn't go down. I saw bone chips fly off into the gravel at the side of the road, and blood sprayed as far as my shoes, but the cow just shook its head and stared at the truck driver. 

"God's looking out for that one," the woman said. 

The trucker lifted his cap off and then settled it back on his head. I saw that he was bald underneath. He fired another shot into the cow's head, and more blood and bone chips flew. The cow staggered this time but still didn't go down. It started running down the road. And now the surviving cows started after it, bellowing at us as they passed. Even the one that had been lying behind my car got up and went with them. 

The truck driver aimed at the wounded cow once more, but this time his gun jammed. He worked at it for a moment, then swore and threw the gun to the ground. I was half expecting it to go off, but it never did. 

"That was almost miraculous," the woman said. When the truck driver looked at her, she added, "For the cow, I mean."

"That wasn't anything but a jammed round," the driver said.

We watched the cows go down the road, leaving a trail of blood behind them. About two or three hundred feet down, they suddenly swerved into the field, heading towards the airport's lights. Even from this distance, we could see the cloud of steam rising from their hides.

"Well, if it wasn't a miracle," the woman said, "then I think it's as close as we're going to get."




WHERE WE LIVE 
By Peter Darbyshire


I WENT BACK to The Code a couple of months after I'd been kicked out. I was still out of work and almost out of money. It was the middle of the afternoon, and the place was almost empty. I was thinking about robbing it, but I couldn't see a waitress or bartender anywhere, although someone was laughing in the kitchen. I sat at the bar and dropped some of my last quarters into the electronic poker game there.

The only other person in The Code was Wyman. He was sitting at a table in the back corner, talking into his cell phone, but when he saw me he hung up and came over. He sat on the stool beside me, his eyes fixed on the television screen above the bar. There was a football game on, but I couldn't tell who was playing. "I don't have anything to sell you today," Wyman said. "I'm all cleaned out, and my supplier's gone out of town." This was Wyman's business: he sat at that table in the corner nine-to-five and sold drugs to the regulars and anyone else who could afford it. He used to work in the movie business as an extra or something, but I think he was making more money this way.

"That's all right," I said, "because I'm broke anyway."

He thought that over for a moment. "Well, you want to make some money then?"

"I just came in here to have a drink and play this game," I told him. But I'd already lost and I didn't have any more quarters.

Wyman nodded and lit a cigarette with a silver Zippo lighter. He kept flicking it open and shut while he watched the football game. "I need some help with a break and enter," he said. 

I looked around the bar again, but I still couldn't see the waitress. I thought about going behind the counter to pour myself a beer. "I didn't know you were a burglar," I said.

He shook his head. "It's not like that. The stuff I'm taking is mine. But I have to break into the place to get it."

"I don't understand."

"It's my supplier's place." He leaned closer, glancing around the empty bar. "She's out of town, but all my stuff is there. I'm going to clean her out while she's gone."

"What's in this for me?" I asked.

"I'll give you two hundred dollars," he said.

"You want me to help rip off a dealer for two hundred dollars?" I laughed. "I don't know."

"You don't have to actually do anything," he said. "I just want somebody to go with me."

"I don't understand," I said.

"Call it moral support."

I looked at him closer. He hadn't shaved in days, and his upper lip was covered in little beads of sweat. "Who exactly is your dealer, Wyman?" I asked.

"My ex-wife," he said.

I stared at him. "You were married?" 



WE WALKED DOWN the street to the coffee shop where Wyman had parked his minivan. Overhead, the clouds were racing past like the entire sky was some sort of time-lapse movie. There wasn't even a breeze down here. 

The minivan's seats were covered with boxes and garbage bags full of clothing. Wyman had to pile them in the back to make room for me. "What's all this?" I asked, sorting through some shirts that couldn't ever have been in style.

"Jesse's been cleaning the apartment," he said, shaking his head. "She's making me get rid of all the clothes other women bought me. My closet's empty. It's like I'm eighteen all over again."

I looked at all the boxes and bags. "I've never had this many clothes in my life."

"I just can't bear to give them to Goodwill or someplace like that," he went on. "I mean, can you imagine some fucking stranger wearing my clothes?"

We drove to a subdivision in the north end of the city, a quiet and clean place that looked as if it had been abandoned and sterilized at daybreak. All the lawns were yellow. Wyman parked in front of one of the houses, in an empty driveway with dead grass sticking up through the cracks. There wasn't a single person in sight. I waited for Wyman to tell me what to do, but he didn't say anything or get out. He just kept turning in his seat to look at the other houses surrounding us. 

"I've never done anything like this before," he finally said, turning off the minivan's engine and lighting a cigarette.

"Me neither," I said. "But this was your idea, remember?"

We sat there a moment longer, the clouds still racing past overhead, and then Wyman said, "All right then." We got out and went to the back of the van. Wyman emptied out a couple of the boxes, tossing the clothes over the back seat, and handed them to me. "Here," he said. "Take these to the side door."

"How big of a stash does she have?" I asked, looking into the empty boxes. They were bleach boxes, at least two feet deep and reinforced with extra glue.

Wyman crawled into the back of the van for more boxes. "What are you talking about?" he asked.

I went around the side of the house, to an old wooden door with a stained glass window. A mat on the step actually had the word Welcome painted on it, but you had to look close to see it under the dirt. All the blinds were drawn in the windows of the neighbouring house, so I figured no one was home there. I put one of the boxes over my fist and was drawing it back to punch through the stained glass when Wyman walked around the corner.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"I thought we were breaking into the place," I said.

"Not like that," he said. He dropped the boxes he was carrying and took a gold card out of his wallet. I stepped aside as he inserted it between the door and frame. There was a soft click, and then he pushed the door open. 

I looked around one more time before entering the house. In one of the neighbour's windows, a black-and-white cat had crawled in between the blinds and the glass. It sat on the windowsill, watching us with unblinking blue eyes. We went inside.

We were in a kitchen that was all wooden counters and shiny steel pots hanging from the walls. A skylight ran its entire length, giving the room a white glow. I could hear a clock ticking somewhere.

"Looks expensive," I said.

"Take off your shoes," he said, bending down to untie his own. "I don't want to be leaving dirt and shit all over the place. That's how they always track people down in the cop shows."

I kicked off my shoes. "What about hair fibers and that sort of thing?" I asked.

"They only do that for murders. As long as we don't kill anyone, we'll be fine."

I followed Wyman down the hall, into the living room. There was an Ikea couch and chair, a big-screen Sony television, a Toshiba stereo system, and some