TORONTO, A NOVEL: Chapter 33


Fish, having peed against a couple of subway seats and—as was usual with him—against the legs of a few early-morning, northbound passengers (one of whom, a young woman, seemed mightily displeased with him for showering her red alligator pumps) decided he had worn out his welcome, and, when the train ground to a stop, trotted out through the open door of the car and out onto the platform of the Summerhill Station.
     Subway Station platforms were home to Fish, living, as he did, at the Spadina Station (north-south line).  But this one, he noticed, wasn’t exactly like the one where he and Bliss Carmen lived.  And so finding nothing to detain him at trainside, he mounted the steps at the end of the platform and found himself out on the street.
     Fish hadn’t seen many cars and trucks. Mostly just streetcars.  And Yonge Street (for that’s what it was) seemed especially busy, just at the moment, with hundreds of these small, fast, non-streetcars zipping up and down.  He did notice, though, that from time to time, they’d all come to a halt together, all at the same time,   He also noticed, being a smart pooch (his brain acute with candy bars), that whenever all the cars stopped, certain people, who had been waiting on the sidewalk, now took advantage of this lull, and stepped out bravely, moving between the throbbing vehicles, now momentarily arrested, heading quickly for the other side of the street.
     And that’s what Fish did.  Which landed him safely on the south-west corner of Summerhill and Yonge.  To Fish, this corner looked almost like the one from which he had just departed except for the presence there of a large warehouse-like building there. Its door was ajar doors, and from inside, an insistent, abrasive kind of music pulsed out onto the street.
     Fish liked music.  And open doors.  So he went in.
     The building was mostly dark, but there was a large open space near its centre which burned with light brighter than the sunlight he had left out on the street.  Fish moved carefully closer.  Just close enough in fact that the edge of the pool of light reached out and gathered him into its all-pervasive glare.  Fish’s spiky hair and his bristly whiskers suddenly looked as if they had caught on fire.
     There was a shriek. 
     “What’s that?? screamed a female voice.  Fish looked back into the shadows behind him and couldn’t see anything.
     “What?  What on earth do you mean?” replied a tense, harried, impatient male voice.  Suddenly there were agitated, questing voices everywhere and then all the lights came on.  Fish stood there, in what had been the veiling comfort of shadow, now entirely revealed.  He felt more lost and out of place than ever.
     “My god, it’s a dog!!” said the female voice.
     “That’s a dog??” said the male voice.
     Fish mustered the canine equivalent to a wry and hopeful smile and wagged what passed for his tail.
     “A spook!” cried another voice.
     “A shade!”
     “A little hairy Manticore!” cried a fifth voice—belonging to someone who had clearly been doing some reading.
     Then the female voice spoke again, softer this time.
     “It’s just a strange little dog and—oh dear—he seems to be lost!  Oh, Linc, let’s take him home and look after him!”
     “Coal, we don’t live like that.  We’re not stray dog people!”
     “Well maybe we ought to be.”
     Fish couldn’t have known it, of course, but he had inadvertently wandered into a fashion shoot.  Coal Blackstone, the supermodel who now shown him such compassion was being photographed by her favourite photographer and sometime lover, Lincoln Ford.  The floor under the area’s pool of light was sandy, and Coal was dressed in a crisp blue-and-white, and therefore vaguely nautical two-piece swimsuit—like two signal flags flying from the trim navy torpedoboat of her body.  She stood before Linc’s cameras as if she were the sole inhabitant of a Pacific atoll and were patiently waiting for rescue.  The only incongruity in the scene was a big pink beachball resting near Coal on the sand.  Coal had protested that it was unlikely that a castaway would come ashore armed with a beachball, but Link had felt at the time that the scene might well be re-jigged into something more domestic—like as frolic at Malibu. 
     But now a scruffy little dog has washed ashore—or at least trotted into the scenario.  And the on-again-off-again beachball concern was now made irrelevant, however, by Fish’s taking a liking to the big pink sphere, and cocking his back leg against it.
     “Aww geez, look at that!” fumed Linc, pointing to the steaming beachball.
     “Well, now we’re committed to the atoll!” laughed Coal.  “C’mon Link, let’s finish up.”


     Meanwhile, unwilling to wait any longer for Michael to show up and help he search fur Fish, Bliss had gone over to the studio of her friend, painter and short-order cook, Homer Rubik—who was soon at work producing “Lost Dog” posters for her.  He was taking an awfully long time about each one of them too.
     “Can’t you hurry it up?” Bliss asked him.  Time’s going by and who knows how far Fish has got to?”
     But Homer couldn’t be hurried.  Each Fish-poster he made was a small renaissance-style masterpiece, jewel-like, immaculate.

TORONTO: A NOVEL--Chapter 32


     The phone rang.  It rang in that jagged way phones ring when there’s someone in great agitation at the other end of the line.  Michael picked up his wristwatch from the bedside table and peered at it.  6am. 
     May stirred in her sleep.  Her black, black hair lay tangled on the pillow.  In the course of Michael’s turning over to peer at his watch, the duvet had slipped down to reveal one of he pearlescent shoulders, glowing in the early light like a waning moon.
     The phone continued to ring, and Michael found himself torn between answering it or ignoring it and returning to the soft welcome of May’s peaceful body, as warm, he thought to himself, as a croissant from the oven.  May always reminded him, when she awakened, of fresh pastry.
     “A crescent moon,” he said out loud, proud of his pun, so early in the morning.  He picked up the phone.
     “Michael?” shrieked the voice at the other end.
    “Of course,” he replied.  “At six in the morning, who else?”
     “It’s Bliss,” boomed the voice.
     “I know,” he said. “Everybody in the building knows.”
     May shifted in the depths of the duvet and turned to peer up at him.
     “Is anything the matter?”
     Michael smiled at her.
     “Only the fact that I’m on the stupid phone instead of cozy with you.” 
     May slipped down further under the duvet and tried to go back to sleep
     “Michael?  Are you there?  Who are you talking to?”
     “I’m talking to May,” Michael told her.  “Who else would I be talking to?”
     “Well,” said Bliss crisply, “I want you to talk to me!”
     “What about?  It’s six o’clock in the morning, do you know that, Bliss?”
     “Michael, Fish is gone!”
     “Really?” he said through a yawn.  “Where?”
     “For Chrissake, Michael, if I knew where, I wouldn’t be calling you!”
     “Why did you call me, Bliss?
     “Because I want you to help me find him.”
     Michael picked up his watch and strapped it on, looking around the room, at the bed with May in it, at his worktable, piled so high with books and papers he couldn’t see his laptop, at a huge all-blue painting on the wall above the bed—a painting he had made last year, having convinced himself it was his special, heartfelt homage to French artist Yves Klein—to the chair on May’s side of the bed, where, last night, she had carefully deposited her neatly folded jeans, sweater, bra and panties, and back to the bed again.  May, now having reluctantly given up the idea of more sleep, sat up in bed and stretched.  Her white breasts lifted and fell again, like foam on a wave.
     “Good morning” she whispered in Michael’s direction.  He placed his hand over the receiver.
     “Good morning,” he whispered back.
     “Michael??”  He had almost entirely forgotten about Bliss—no easy feat, he thought to himself.
     “Yes, I’m still here, Bliss.”
     “You’ve got to help me.”
     “But Bliss, I have no idea where Fish would go.  How am I supposed to find him?”
     “Well, you understand dogs,” she said.
     “No, I don’t,” he told her, rather more vehemently than he had meant to.  “When did you last see him?”
     “Just before I called you.”
     “Where was he?”
     “He walked right through the open door of a waiting subway car,” Bliss told him. This wasn’t as odd as it first sounded, given that she and Bliss lived—somehow--in the Spadina Subway station.
     “He took the first train!” Michael laughed.  “Ambitious dog!”
     “That’s not funny, Michael.  Where could he be?”
     “What train was it?  Northbound or southbound?”
     “What difference does it make?”
     “Well, I don’t know, it narrows the search by quite a bit!”
     “Okay, north.  It was a northbound train.”
     “I wonder where he got off?” said Michael, still only half serious about this whole thing.
     “Maybe somebody saw him,” Bliss suggested.
     “Maybe. Well, actually, I’m sure lots of people saw him.  Fish is an easy dog to spot, and difficult to forget.” Especially, thought Michael to himself, if he pissed on the legs of a few early-morning subway passengers.  As he was wont do do.
     “He’ll be hungry, poor lamb,” wailed Bliss.
     “He’ll be fine.  He’ll just steal a few Crispy Crunch bars from a newsstand.”
     “Or a Skor bar,” whimpered Bliss, now close to tears.
     “Sure,” said Michael.

TORONTO: A NOVEL Chapter 31



 “Dragon’s Breath, right?”
     “Yes, that’s right” said Rory Penlift, already feeling oddly defensive about the title of his poetry-book-to-come.  Who was this guy Michael, anyhow, to make him feel unsure of himself?  A friend of May’s or no friend of May’s, it didn’t seem right for a guy he’d just met to be so immediately confrontational.  Geez, he hadn’t even finished the tea May had made for the two of them.
     “Why?”  Rory added, “You don’t like that title?”
     Michael glanced at May, in whose eyes he thought he glimpsed both disapproval and the fervent wish that he’d just leave the whole subject alone.
     “This will be Rory’s first book,” said May carefully, pouring out the last of their tea.
     Michael nodded.  Rory beamed.
     “But why Dragon’s Breath?” Michael asked again.
     “I just liked the sound of it,” Rory answered. “For me, it suggested a certain power, verbal force, unknowable heat!”
     “The trouble is, it also suggests a whole lot of other things as well.”
     “Oh yeh?  Like what?”
     “Well, said Michael, warming to his task and avoiding May’s disapproving stare, “like a beer called Dragon’s Breath.  And there’s a red opal called Dragon’s Breath. And a blue cheese.  But,” said Michael, in his most intimidating, authoritative voice, “the best known Dragon’s Breath of all, is a certain kind of incendiary ammunition for a 12-gauge shotgun.  It makes a rifle into a flamethrower.  Nice, huh?
     May got up to go and rinse out the teapot.
     “Wow,” said Rory quietly.
     “Wow nothing, do you really want to live with any of those associations?”
     “Well, the shotgun thing is pretty powerful,” said Rory.
     “But does it have anything at all to do with your poems?” Michael asked him, getting rapidly bored with the whole business and beginning to wonder how May and this callow boy could possibly be friends.
     “No, I suppose not,” Rory admitted.  When I wrote the poems I was going more with the whole medieval thing.  You know, St. George and the Dragon and all that.  Fiery breath.” 
     Michael was ready to take a whack at him.
     But just then May returned with the washed teapot.
     Michael got up to go.
     “Listen,” May told him, “why don’t we meet late this afternoon, after I close up the store?  There’s a new tea place that’s opened, just up on Bloor Street.  Let’s met there and then go to dinner.  What do you say?”
     Michael grinned.
     “I say okay,” he told her. He then offered Rory his unenthusiastic congratulations on the book and made his departure.
     Rory looked at May. 
     “Tough kind of a guy,” he said.
     “Michael’s lovely,” she replied.  “He gets impatient.”
     “So do I,” said Rory.
     “No you don’t.”
     “No, I guess not.  Not very often anyway.”
     “Not ever,” said May.
     The coffee shop May wanted to try was called David Pythagoras Fine Teas and it was white as an iceberg inside.
The walls were white and the floors were white.  The light from the ceiling racks of LED bulbs—there seemed to be hundreds of them—was blinding and, since it ignited both the walls and the floor in an integrated miasma of volcanically intense white radiance, it caused you, when you entered the shop, to pick your way tentatively across the space, uncertain of the depth and placement of things.  The light made you appear to be treading water.  It was like walking in a substanceless cold cream.
     May and Michael picked their way through the front part of the shop, making for one of what seemed to be four tiny jet-black tables and chairs at the back.  Over at the right, running the length of the store, there was a prodigious wall of shiny silvered canisters, each one labelled with the name of the tea it presumably held.  Through the glare, Michael could just make out, behind the counter, a girl-shaped density in the whitened space that he thought might possibly be a waitress or sales person.
     “Good evening!” the girl-shaped density sang out, just moving enough so that Michael could see that she was indeed a figure—detached and whole—set against the ground of tea canisters.
     “Bright,” whispered May.
     “Blinding,” said Michael. “Cauterizing.”
     The tables seemed remarkably delicate and, given their shiny blackness and their morphologically unfathomable design—each was as attenuated as a false eyelash, and as ultimately unstable as wrought-iron made from liquorice twizzlers—not as much a haven as one might have liked in this dizzying, omnidirectional glare.  Michael tried to sit down and nearly missed the seat.  May, on the other hand, slid as gracefully into her black spiderweb as a leaf alighting on the surface of a sooty pond.
     “Lots of teas,” she said.
     “Too many,” said Michael, still trying to disentangle his right foot from the table—which seemed to sport cunning black flanges and scallops of metal embroidery and had now effected some unimaginable hold on his trouser leg.
     “What sort of tea do you feel like?” she asked him.
      “Something green, I guess.”
     May disentangled herself lithely from her sooty faerie-table and walked gracefully through the glare to the girl-shaped density behind the counter.   She was gone a long time.
     When she returned, she was carrying a hefty glass teapot and two glass cups.
     “This,” she announced proudly, “setting the giant teapot heavily on the spindly table, “is a green tea called Countess of Seville!”
     “Spanish green tea?” Michael asked.  “What’s in it?”
     “The girl told me …”
     “There’s a girl over there?” Michael asked her.
     “The girl told me,” May continued, “that the tea was imbued with orange oil…”
     “Which explains the Seville part, I guess.”
     “AND,” May added loudly, “oil of Bergamot.”
     Michael picked up his glass cup to hand to her.
     “That’s odd,” he said.  “It feels as light as a soap bubble.  Not like glass at all.”
     May poured the Countess of Seville into both their cups.
It was pale yellow—like white wine or like a urine sample.
     Michael spoke through the preternatural whiteness to the girl-shaped clerk over at the tea-wall.
     “Is this really glass?” he asked, holding up his cup.
     “Of course,” she assured him.
     “But it doesn’t feel like glass.  It isn’t heavy enough.”
     “Well, it’s actually a kind of hybrid glass that all David  Pythagoras tea shops use.”
     “What do you mean, hybrid?” asked Michael, squinting through the shop’s whiteness.
     “Wait.” said the girl-voice, “I’ll look it up in the computer.”
     She busied herself for a few minutes, while they sipped their Seville.  Then, after what seemed like twenty minutes or so, she called out to them.
     “Here it is!  It says it’s called “material glass,” and is basically—mostly—silicone-based.”
     “Silicone?”
     “It says here it’s heat resistant.”
     Michael put his cup down on the spidery table.
     “Let’s get out of here.”
     “But you’ve hardly tasted your tea,” said May.
     “That’s okay, “said Michael, “I don’t know what oil of Bergamot tastes like anyhow.  And,” he added, “I’m sure he Countess of Seville will understand.”