CHAPTER THREE:


  

      “So if you’re such a big-deal writer, “said Bliss, “What do you write?”
     “Stories,” Michael told her.  “and I never said I was a big deal writer.”
     “Big writer,” she laughed.  “Huge writer!  Larger-than-life!  One look at you, Sir Cardigan, and I can see you don’t even know any stories, not even one story!”
     “Maybe you’ll be one. You could hold still and be a story, couldn’t you?”
     “You just have no imagination at all, do you?” said Bliss.
     “Not a lot, “he admitted.  “Listen,” he added, “this is a bit embarrassing, but what do you use for a toilet?”
     “Why?  You have to go?”
     “I have to pee, yes.”
     “Well, you just go over to the other side and pee on the tracks,” said Bliss.  “Looking both ways first, of course!”
     Michael went.  And then came back.
     “What do you do,” he said, making sure his zipper was fully zipped, “if it’s more…you know, dire?”
     “Dire?”
     “Well if you have to, you know, poop or something.”
     “You go outside and find yourself an all-night coffee shop.”
     “I see,” said Michael.
     “Speaking of which, it’s too bad we can’t have a cup of tea or something,” Bliss added.  “Don’t you think we could use a cup of tea?  Some nice, heavy, green, self-righteous algae tea that’d be really good for us?  And maybe a big slice of cake?”
     “I suppose we could find to a Second Cup or something,” said Michael.  “I don’t know if they’ll have cake.”
     “Well, somewhere that has cake then.”
     “What about Fish?
     “We’ll leave him here,” said Bliss.  “He’ll be okay.”
     “Here?  On the subway platform?”
     “Sure,” she says. “That’s where I found him.  Listen, do you have a toonie?”
     Michael dug in his pockets.  “One,” he told her.
     “So look, could you go over to the candy machine and buy Fish a chocolate bar?”
     “That’s not a great thing to give a dog.”
     “Well that’s what he likes best, okay?  He likes the crunchy ones—like a Skor bar or a Coffee Crisp or a Crispy Crunch.  They’re more like bones!”





CHAPTER TWO





The seated streetcar woman takes a hard look at Fish.
     “His collar’s too tight,” she says.
     The big girl laughs long and loud.  “Not as tight as my fucking bra!!” she replies. 
     The streetcar clambers around a tight bend of track and shudders to a stop at the station.  People fall out in twos and threes onto the platform and disperse themselves in the granular light.  The big girl and her bottlebrush dog swagger from the streetcar and pause, both of them looking around as if to plot their next moves.
     Michael is the last passenger to disembark.  As he passes the girl and the dog, she calls out to him, “Hey there Slick, how about buying my beautiful dog Fish?”
     Michael is taken aback.
     “Oh, well no thanks,” he tells her, glancing at Fish.  “I’ve got no room for a dog, I’m afraid!”
     “Oh don’t be afraid,” the girl tells him, “not of the dog, not of me, not of the cold, not of the moon, not of this stupid empty streetcar station, not of those stiff old candy bars over there in that vending machine, not of anything, not of mother or father or God or the Queen or the Mayor!”
     Michael wondered how the Mayor suddenly got into this.
     Now apparently exhausted by the recitation of her long list of things not to be afraid of, the big girl suddenly stretched out flat on her back on the subway platform.  Fish wagged his bottlebrush tail and licked her face.
     “Why don’t you go home?” said Michael.
     “I am home, Slick!  This is IT, Mr. Well-bred-Fellow-Traveler- Loafer-shod-Cardigan-guy!  What do you think?  Le platform, c’est moi, pal” she says.  “I sleep here almost every night.  Usually under a bench. 
     She clambers to her feet again.
    “Or sometimes in a trash can, surrounded by candy wrappers and covered over with newspapers.  Nobody knows I’m in there.  And Fish keeps me warm.”
     She yanks the dog’s leash so the creature gives out a sharp, strangled cry.
     “Who are you anyhow?” Michael asks her.
     Okay, I’d better tell you my name straight off because you’d never be able to guess it.”
     “I wasn’t going to try to guess it,” Michael says.
     “Bliss Carmen,” she says, extending her hand.
     “That’s the name of a famous Canadian poet,” he says, shaking it.
     “Yeh?” says Bliss.  “Well he’s through with it now.  And anyhow, I made it up.”
     “You must have seen it somewhere,” says Michael.
     “Okay, in a book in some bookstore,” Bliss tells him.  “I just liked it.  Don’t you like it?” 
     “I liked it the first time, “Michael tells her. 
     “I made up Fish’s name too.”
     “Yeh, but everybody makes up names for dogs,” says Michael “They don’t come with them.”
     “Well ‘Fish’ suited him.  He likes it.” She looked at Michael more carefully than before.  “Who are you?”
     “My name’s Michael. 
     “Michael what?” she asked him, giving Fish another savage yank.
     “Michael Moskos.”
     “You Greek or something?”
     “Half.  My father was Greek.”
     “So you’re some big Zorba-type guy?”
     “Hardly,” said Michael.
     “What do you do?”
     “I’m a writer.”
     “Oh come on, “says Bliss, “everybody’s a writer for godssake!” I’m a writer, just by way of coincidence.  Even Fish is a writer!” 

Chapter One



     It is the coldest day anyone could remember, and it is settling in to be the coldest night.  The air is bladelike, and it jimmies itself into the streetcar, which is rumbling up Spadina Avenue, and wedges in around the windows and doors.  The passengers are yawning in the cold, and their eyes are small and hard.  It’s eight-thirty.

     The frigid air tightens every sound and makes noises sharp and clear and close enough to be constantly surprising.  When you open your mouth, you end up talking too loud.  And so everybody’s keeping mum.  The streetcar creaks along through the freezing blackness.

     But there’s one young woman, unabashed by the silent cold, who breaks the ice with her I-phone: “I’m on the streetcar!” she yells at somebody in the device, her voice splintering the night.

     Having awakened her vocal chords and found them whole, she then begins to address the assembled passengers.  She is a big girl, heavy and physically eventful, like a fruit loaf, with a wide happy face and eyes like wet raisins.  And she has this dog on a leash, a rubbed little blur of a dog I had not noticed before.  The dog is blackish, greyish, dishwatery, and shaped like a bottle brush.

     This erasure of a dog sniffs petulantly at a woman sitting in a single seat across from the door—sniffs and clearly finds her wanting.  “He’s starved for attention”, the big girl explains happily, even pridefully. “See, I was unemployed, and I used to stay home with him all the time and I’d be with him, like ten hours a day!  But now”, she looks at the woman with something like a plea for understanding in her eyes, “I’ve got this job, and he’s alone all the time.”

     “Oh”, says the woman dully.

     “His name is Fish,” the big girl says.

     “Fish”, the woman repeats, trying to look out into the night and seeing only the big girl’s reflection sailing along over the dark houses.

     “Would you like to buy him?” The big girl asks.  “I’d want five hundred dollars for him”.  Then she turns to the rest us of us.  “I wanted to put this, like outrageous price on him”, she explains to us all, “so like nobody would buy him?  But I guess five hundred’s not really too harsh, right?” and she winks at us.