Our Blessed Lady is smiling down from her cardboard shrine between Janis and Jimi. The 10 a.m. sun crawls in like an icicle, splintering across the papery blanket and Paul McClurg’s face. Caught somewhere between consciousness and oblivion, Paul rolls his body across the permanently opened sofa bed, his fingers tracing the empty pod of his stomach. The light prods his eyelids like a series of painful needles, tearing him from the soft, hallucinogenic comfort of his dream. His body feels as if it is constructed of inter-connected chunks of ice, so cold and so fragile it will break if he moves it. His knees are still clamped over his hands and his backbone is in the same fetal position as it was when he dropped off to sleep five hours ago. Drumrolls of vertigo course through his skull as he gulps the icy air and tries to open his eyes. Pain. His tongue pulls away from its nest at the base of his lower front teeth, releasing a rusty tang. Four days to payday.

Continuing this chant he begins the tedious process of unbinding his body, aware of every crease in every bone, muscle, tendon. He forces his purple fingers up to meet his eyes. He shoves his knuckles against his mouth to get at the thin patch of fog inside, but it is not enough to ignite his nicotine-chapped hands. Be a furnace, a fat huffing furnace, he orders himself, so red-hot full of lava you could fry an egg on your belly.

Everything is on the verge of collapse, from the croaking radiator and chanting toilet to the circa 1968 décor that defines his tiny room. Time and again, he finds himself staring into the octagonal table and triangular chairs as if their stale nostalgia holds a hypnotic cure. The yellow mushroom lamp with a hole burned through its plastic dome, causes a poisonous reek whenever he switches it on. The once-acid impact of the Joplin and Hendrix posters, yellowed by decades of smoke and grease, still bearing their original tape marks. The room itself, more of a closet, reeks of Stone Age Gitanes. Paul’s only source of light, a twelve-by-eighteen inch window, frames the smashed tires of a deserted van. Even if he didn’t have to share the roach-ridden toilet, the place wasn’t worth three hundred a month.

“O Christ, let it work—” He totters to the stove and twisted a knob, producing a tantalizing whiff of gas. Next month I’ll blow my check on a river of apple vermouth, kick down his door and show the owner a real merry Christmas.

His eyes, stickier than porridge, fight to focus on the red digits of his alarm clock, permanently frozen at 12:47. Open your eyes, curse the cold, mouth a prayer, go out, pan the price of a coffee. Stay away from this hellhole as long as you can. Until pay day.

Pay Day. Check Day. The only day of the month when he could pretend to live like a king, taxi around the city, pick up a bottle of Berluzzi, make his rounds of the secondhand bookstores and lastly, select a restaurant with a half-decent menu. Burgers and fries, Jesus I’m sick of junk.

His morning litany underway, he drops back on the bed and as he leans down to lace his boots the heinous oranges and reds of the Op-inspired broadloom rise to meet him. Punctuated by wine stains and cigarette burns, its geometry reminds him of an endless primal scream. One tattering puddle of tinny red, about two feet wide, is a souvenir of his drinking spree two nights before. Why would anyone go to the bother of carpeting a dump like this? Jesus. Are you listening? Send me a miracle, anything at all...  Ah, why do I bother? You can’t hear me. Why should you? You probably don’t exist. Paul’s forty-three year old body is too fatigued to handle another uphill excursion to Maison Secours. He is sick of their food baskets, the whining of his fellow desperados and the goody-goody attitude oozing from the volunteers.  So what if I blow my checks on tobacco and booze? I’m doing the government a favor, handing them back their welfare in taxes.  Smirking hypocrites. Go on, hand the poor bum another turkey and wipe away your transgressions. Damn do-gooders couldn’t handle a single day in my boots.

He spits into his claustrophobic bowl of a sink, twists the left spigot and glares at the drizzle of rust. Who said that time speeds up when you grow old? As far as I’m concerned, time is regressing, slower than molasses on the frozen Saint Lawrence River. He looks into the scabby mirror above the sink and picks up a comb. Forty-three.  He slides it slowly across his scalp. It’s been months since his last haircut and the sparse fringe on his head refuses to be tamed. Looks more like sixty-three. He flings down the comb.

If it wasn’t for Larry— His best friend’s last cry still invades his sparse dreams, one of a few memories that weren’t obliterated by the car crash.  Twenty years. Larry you threw away your life and left me with half a brain. The Seventies. Idiot disco days. Carefree days. Larry was going to med school and Paul was studying philosophy. One night their coke supplier decided to slip them one hell of a mickey, no doubt cutting the already lime-tainted powder with extra PCP. Out of their skulls, Paul and Larry careened out of The Swinging Skull, a disco palace that had originally served as a 1930s funeral home. As they crossed the street a taxi struck them, instantly ending Larry’s life. Paul can still feel the nurse’s disgust when he emerged from his coma three weeks later. “Congratulations. You survived a major concussion. Your junked-up buddy died on impact.” Survived?

Psycho dough, he denounces his disability cheques, vengefully burning every cent on an orgy of taxis, restaurants, movies, liquor, the race track, cocaine and Wanda, a sixteen-year-old runaway from Saskatoon. He wakes up one morning to find Wanda shoving her belongings into a green backpack.

“Hey!” he catches her wrist.

“Hey yourself,” she pulls away. “You lied to me. You’re no electrician. You don’t even own a car. I’ll bet you’re on welfare.”

“Okay, okay, it’s true. I survived a hell of an accident and I’m on disability. I’m sorry I lied to you. I was afraid you wouldn’t want anything to do with—”

“I wouldn’t have, you’re right.”

“But I love you.”

“I’ve got my future to think about.”

“You’re a heroin addict. I can’t stand the thought of you—”

“Keep your judgment to yourself. I’ll kick when I’m good and ready.”

“Stay here, I can help you clean up, we can rent a bigger place—”

“Who do you think you are, the King of Saint Henri? Look Paul or whatever your name is, we haven’t eaten for two days and I’m starving for a fix. I’ve got to move on.”

“You could die out there in the streets.”

“I’m dying right here, right now. If I don’t get what I need I’ll jump out that window.”  She pulls the backpack over her shoulders and slams the rooming house door, leaving him to face the future cold turkey.

Two months later, still wallowing in depression and tired of waiting for Wanda to come back, Paul applies for a job unpacking empty beer bottle crates. During his second day there he experiences what turned out to be a complete mental breakdown. During his recovery he comes across a copy of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. Its insights affect him so profoundly he vows to devote the remainder of his life to denouncing the mindless masses. He embraces anonymity to the point of becoming invisible.

I should have kicked off a long time ago. He squats on the edge of the sagging sofa bed and presses the heel of his right hand against his forehead. I was better off on MacKay Street. With each passing month his former room six blocks away, with its ample sunlight and benign white walls, takes on celestial proportions. Money, that’s what it’s all about. Landlords think they’re mightier than the pope. He has long since given up probing the idiosyncratic roots of his faith. I’m not a schizophrenic like Billy or a psycho like Meatdog. Paul feels trapped somewhere between extremes, not sufficiently intact to find himself a place in the status quo. And yet, not shattered enough to take a dive off the Jacques Cartier Bridge. “At least,” he sighs, “it’s all over for Rez.”

On winter nights when the thermometer plunges below freezing and the transit cops are playing poker, Paul and his friends pool their resources for a liter of apple vermouth and congregate on the top floor of the Guy subway station.

“Rez died last night.” Meatdog takes a triple swig from the long green bottle. He and Paul are leaning against the glass door of a poster shop, watching the escalators spew up commuters, candy wrappers and other assorted flotsam. Before he passes the bottle to Paul, Meatdog rubs his blackened palm over the rim as if to wipe off the germs.

“What happened?” Paul shuts his eyes and takes three gulps of the tinny vermouth, sending some of it slopping onto the sky blue shirt he recently bought for fifty cents. There is a rip in the right pocket of his jeans and some of his change dribbles onto the floor between himself and Meatdog.

“Hey watch that, worse than spilling blood!” Meatdog scoops up the pennies, nickels and quarters. “Stupid ass was playing in traffic. Just down the street, corner of Guy and Saint Catherine. Pow, a mail truck hit him! Took him four hours to die.”

“Why would anybody be driving a mail truck around Montreal at midnight?” Billy Berchuck is perched in his usual niche at the top of the stairs, his hands clasped prayerfully in his green plaid lap. Paul knows better than to pester him for the tail end of his spliff.

“It wasn’t midnight, it was suppertime!” Meatdog snatches the bottle from Paul and begins chanting at a woman coming up the escalator: “Stupid ass! Stupid ass!” Paul shushes his pal. If they make too much noise the baton-swinging transit cops will come crawling up like Nazi roaches in the night. I don’t need another broken rib. Last week they gave Rez a head kicking. He squints at the traces of their dead friend’s blood between the tiles at his feet. No wonder the poor bastard was playing in traffic. He wonders about Meatdog. How will he manage without Rez to keep him from going off the deep end?

“Poor, poor Rez,” warbles Billy, “he was just another poor glue-sniffing unfortunate the Lord saw fit to put out of his misery.”

“You unholy toadstool!” Meatdog slams his elbow into the glass door behind him. “You’d better shut your evil mouth or I’ll shut it for you!”

“Hey Paaaauuul,” Billy ignores Meatdog, “I met the woman of your dreams down at Tuesday’s Save Our Babies rally. Theresa. With a T. I told her all about you. You’ll love her, she’s twenty-three, she’s got the body of Venus and the soul of the Virgin Mary....”

“Why don’t you ask her out?” Paul feels as though a trillion aching needles are jabbing his body. Damn Billy and his matchmaking, damn his bloody endless Bible whacking. “Thanks, but I’m in no shape for a relationship.” He often wonders what happened to Wanda. Six years. Did she wind up a corpse in some gutter or had she managed to clean up her act? She probably conned her way into some middle class lawyer’s spare room.  Oh, I want to go back to my basement, crawl into bed and let my brain dissolve. Larry’s long-dead, Rez is out of his misery. Billy is stoned out of his brain and it won’t be long before Meatdog bites the dust.  So when is it my turn, Lord?

“Women and I no longer connect.” Billy squashes the microscopic shreds of his spliff into the tiled wall next to his face. “You on the other hand, have needs that cannot be fulfilled by an anti-Christ like Søren Kierkegaard.” He motions to the paperback protruding from Paul’s hip pocket.

“Kierkegaard was not an anti-Christ. He simply loathed the hypocritical factions of the Roman Catholic Church.”

“Blasphemy!” spits Paul.

“Hey Cancerface, you should’ve swallowed that!” bellows Meatdog who is pointing at the remains of Billy’s spliff, “waste not want not, remember?”

It has been eight years since Paul first met Billy down at Saint Anthony’s soup kitchen. Billy was boasting about the incredible sex he was having with fifteen-year-old Violet, who spent her days concocting speedballs and fairy tales about going on the road with a dead end punk band. Meanwhile Billy hashed his way to heaven on third-rate roaches. One day when Violet announced that she’d aborted Billy’s child, Billy went on a rampage, attacking a soup kitchen priest and informing a taxi driver of Violet’s crime. “She didn’t tell me until it was too late,” he wailed, the sweat trickling down his pudgy, unshaven face, “we could have had a family. I could have been a father!” Violet fled to Toronto and Billy, too broke to pursue her, became Montreal’s most resolute anti-abortion crusader.

“Whatever you do, Billy, don’t give up,” sighs Paul, his eyes tracing Meatdog’s charred, tear-streaked face. The poor jerk will destroy himself. I can see it. I can’t believe it myself. Rez is gone. When he tries to pat Meatdog’s shoulder the old trouper lets out two animal-like screeches.

“It’s too late,” moans Billy, thrusting his arms in the night air. “Our fates are sealed in the Book of Job.”

“I’m sorry, Kierkegaard, that I have failed in my mission to achieve absolute obscurity.” Paul heaves himself off the bed and a brass button flies from the coat he purchased two winters ago. The stale leather maxi cost him ten dollars and a screaming match with an ex-hippie who denounced him as a capitalist pig in front of a Salvation Army cashier. How much longer can he endure the monthly crawl down to Saint Antoine Street, only to end up haggling with welfare mothers, fellow addicts, students and the perpetual unemployed? And all for what? Rack after ubiquitous racks of worn business suits, jeans that looked as if they’d been treated to a thousand stone-washings, jackets whose cuffs emitted spidery bursts of thread, shirts the consistency of threadbare pillow cases, ancient Elton John platforms and long-diminished loafers. Thinking back, it was the coat’s pristine condition that had compelled him to break from his devotion to anonymity and put up a battle for the black coat. It was almost impossible to find a secondhand winter coat in such mint condition and facing off against the old hippy had given him an unexpected jolt of pleasure. Even if the coat couldn’t provide him an edge in his quest for the ultimate woman, he could always amuse himself playing with the brass buttons. The embossed anchor motifs reminded him of his childhood dream to run away to Bali or Singapore, picturing himself up clinging to the mast of a clipper ship surrounded by the screams of a typhoon.

He tightens the belt around his gaunt torso and makes his daily pitch through the pockets, turning up a few coins. God I’d trade this coat for a sugarbomb. Visions of jelly doughnuts pursue him as he bangs open his door.

The hallway reeks of stale curry, bacon and scorched coffee. He clicks the door behind him and slinks toward the exit, hoping to avoid the janitor’s caterwauls. He never bothers to lock his door. Let them steal my paperbacks and sour milk. The reek of seared pork stings his nostrils and he holds his nose en route to the exit door. They must be cooking Alpo again. He rifles nervously through his pockets and smiles when he turns up a half-smoked cancer stick. He propped the cigarette between his lips, savoring the moment he will light it. The side door clanks shut, its broken spring jouncing behind him. He cringes in pain when the north wind slices across his damp, hatless head. If it weren’t for the vicious cold, he would have staked himself a camp up on Mount Royal under a hidden rocky overhang, looking down on all the people and their noise.

The January sky offers him all the solace of a sickly tarpaulin. Pallid, crooked Tupper Street, tripping with potholes, muggers, students and shift workers from the nearby Reddy Memorial, reminds him of an anemic vein leeched of its nutrients. With its fresh pink façades, brass-plated doorknobs and frilly balconies the south side is a tribute to 1980s urban renewal, all traces of the old neighborhood spirit vanquished along with the nineteenth century turrets. Everybody, notes Paul, goes out of their way to ignore everybody else, leaving in their wake a ghostly translucence that only adds to the cheerless and grimy horizon.

Yuppies. Paul spits on the sidewalk. Sometimes, labels came in handy. He still finds “yuppie” the perfect label to pin on the “Starers,” those people who peer at him with a disgust that borders on criminal. The word “handicapped,” is another. It has been ten years since Billy wised him up to the idea of acquiring full welfare benefits while keeping the inspectors off your back. All you have to do is fain a mental breakdown, tell the doctors you hear and see things that aren’t really there. Paul’s first attempt at a “breakdown” is a dismal failure. After deliberately downing a bottle of Billy’s “Green Lava”—cheap wine spiked with uppers and downers—Paul teeters his way into the Montreal General’s emergency room. He begins to harass everyone in the waiting area until two doctors assess the root of his problem and the cops are called. Paul finds himself being dragged down to Station 25 and unceremoniously deposited in a holding cell. When the meth-spiked wine wears off he nearly does experience a mental breakdown, pulling on the bars and grunting like an intoxicated gorilla for what seems like days.

His next attempt at a breakdown is more successful, perhaps because it is utterly unplanned. One minute, he is hoisting empty beer crates into a waiting truck. The next, he begins to feel a jabbing yet oddly rubbery sensation in his head. He drops the crate and freezes in his tracks as everything around him became eerily illuminated. The hair on his co-workers’ heads begins to sparkle. Faces radiate smiles or tears. The tires on the truck he had been loading expand until their rubber swells into smooth black dough, their notches exhaling into valleys. His mind, however, unable to connect with the brilliant scene, can register only blankness. Tears streamed down his face and he begins to curse, swinging his arms to protect himself from the intrusive, now-threatening images around him. He comes to in a hospital bed, staring up at a row of rusted curtain hooks and feeling inexplicably thankful that the curtain is a non-threatening, non-luminous avocado green.

He somehow remembers to tell the doctors that he hears radio-transmitted voices.

“Schizophrenic,” pronounces Dr. Schell two weeks later, staring down at Paul and scrawling something on his clipboard. Paul remains in that same bed for a month and a half, watching doctors come and go, pumping various intravenous serums into his wrist or inducing him to swallow various substances that made his mind buzz one minute and black out the next. One morning, he is pumped full of a drug called Stelazine and experiences the deepest, dimmest buzz of his life. When he opens his eyes again he is being wheeled into a conference room and placed in the center of about twenty doctors seated in a circle.

“Can you tell me your name, please?” asked one. When Paul attempts to speak his entire body feels paralyzed. The single sound he longs to emit is unable to leave his vocal chords.

“Definitely catatonic,” responds another doctor.

He departs from the hospital armed with two different prescriptions, his shriveled backpack and a signed document he is instructed to take to his local welfare office. He blows the first cheque on a taxi ride all the way to Dorval, a Saint Hubert chicken dinner with wine followed by two movies, a trek to the local secondhand book store and a dozen bottles of Berluzzi.

The initial ‘pay day’ high quickly dissipates when Paul realizes that more than half the money goes to cover the rent and some food. The remainder goes into dowsing his depression in Berluzzi, which he finds strangely more soothing than hard liquor. The pharmaceuticals do nothing at all for him except to induce a sensation comparable to having a lead umbrella dropped on his brain. So he hands his drugs to Phil and the glue sniffers who hang around Stoners Park. Because sniffers do anything they can get their hands on, Paul feels he is helping them out by supplying them with a more sanitary high.

The wind is picking up to a shriek. So far, the day has nothing to offer but sub-arctic cold. The north side of Tupper is a jumble of 1920s row houses and 1960s apartment buildings whose brick walls and balconies are bursting with old age. How many times has he scoured those alleys to find return-for-deposit bottles lurking between the used syringes and restaurant refuse? That was at least one good thing life on Tupper had to offer, along with its proximity to buses, hospitals and corner stores.

Paul pushes himself toward Cabot Square, also known as Stoners Park. The patch of green space surrounding the explorer’s monument acquired its more popular nickname during the late Sixties, but its reputation as one of the city’s hottest drug spots was finally quashed by the big clean up two years back. Now that the police have raided it to death, only pigeons and sparrows flock to the bland square. He shoves his face into his lapels and aims for Cabot Park. Several yards ahead of him a well-dressed woman is trying to run, skidding perilously toward a taxi. Her arms are weighed down by an oversized shopping bag and several packages. The wind is blowing so hard, the coat is slipping away from her shoulders and a magnificent, rose-imbued silk scarf is fluttering around her. “Wait!” she shouts. The jumbo shopping bag is barely an inch above the ground.

Dazzled by her long white fur coat Paul trips over a chunk of frozen slush and stumbles, nearly falling to the pavement. He looks up in time to see the edge of her glorious white fur coat disappearing into the taxi. Five yards behind the cab, one of her gigantic shopping bags is heaped on the sidewalk, its broken handles and metallic veneer reflecting the arctic sun. As the taxi swerves around the corner Paul begins to run. “Madame! Mademoiselle!” A five-dollar reward would save the day. The taxi cuts a red light and swerves up Atwater. Christ.

He pauses to catch his breath and scan the deserted street before making his careful descent on the gigantic silver bag. As he thrusts his hand inside, a musky odor permeates his senses and before he realizes it, he is pulling a mahogany-colored coat from the bag, too hungry to bother worrying whether he is having a hallucination. A mink coat! It takes him less than a minute to pull off his faithful old Sally Ann maxi, letting it drop unceremoniously onto the dirty, frozen sidewalk at his feet. In record time he wraps the luxurious burgundy-brown fur around his rickety frame. Jesus, it fits! Although its sleeves barely cover his nicotine-soldered fingers the mink does conceal his vermouth-stained jeans all the way to the ankles. Fair trade. He shoves his old maxi into the silver bag and shuffles into Cabot Park.

Billy Berchuck is slumped on a park bench outside the Alexis Nihon Plaza. He looks higher than a helicopter, thinks Paul, his excitement momentarily dimmed. Billy’s trademark shopping cart is set at an awkward angle in front of him, festooned with pink and silver balloons and heaped with ketchup-smeared infant dolls and flyers. Tilted over the entire mess is a bowed picket sign labeled Lock The Anti-Christs Away. There is a baby’s picture torn from a magazine taped to a goldfish bowl in Billy’s lap. Under the picture he has printed in red marker: If you love me you will save me.

“Have they let you back in at St. Anthony’s?” Paul smiles patronizingly. There must be ten bucks in that bowl, he calculates, remembering the day Father Beacon was forced to ban Billy from the church when the ardent crusader refused to stop pushing his cart down the center aisle during mass.

Billy’s irises resemble brown buzzers behind his half-inch thick reading glasses. “God is on this martyr’s side.” He takes a languid draw from his roach clip.

“You’re looking good, Billy.” Paul’s eyes are fixed on the goldfish bowl.

“There are mountains to climb, chasms to endure,” intones Billy as he ogles a pair of mating pigeons. Their discordant squawks break the mid-morning silence as one bird drives a beak under its partner’s left wing. “Simultaneous combustion,” moans Billy, rolling his eyes skyward, “the dove is no symbol of peace.”

“Yeah, pigeons will be the death of us all, eh?” Paul’s stomach roils as he picks up the fragrance of frying bacon from Bonjour Breakfast across from the park. “Listen, can you spare some of that?” he finally stammers.

“You are not listening!” Billy picks up the bowl and jams it between his green plaid thighs. “This is holy money,” he hisses. “God’s bread.”

Paul leans forward. “Didn’t Jesus say ‘love thy brother?’ Reach out? Help the needy? I’m starving for Christ’s sake. A Christian in need!”

“Get thee hence, disciple of Kierkegaard!” Billy heaves himself up off the bench and dumps the goldfish bowl on top of his shopping cart, squashing posters and flyers. The pigeons endure one last skirmish before fleeing to the snow-caped statue in the center of the park. “Satan!” Billy reminds Paul of a debauched priest on a midnight bender. His ranting escalates as he rams the sticky-wheeled cart out of the park. Paul hoists the shopping bag and makes a run for the plaza door. There’s probably more angel dust than hash in that roach. He curses and stumbles down the mucky stairs leading to the overheated plaza. Berchuck can push his abortion cart to hell for all I care. He is so intent on attacking Billy he walks directly into a hefty man whose black beard covers almost every available inch of his leathery face.

“Haven’t you heard of animal rights?” Paul feels the painful thud of a fist against his fur-clad arm and finally realizes that he is face to face with a man whose black leather jacket is emblazoned with the Saint-Remi Copperheads insignia.

“Look brother, I’m sorry I walked into you.”

“You deaf too? I’m talking about your coat, rich guy. You believe in murdering innocent animals?”

“Rich?” Although he is terrified, Paul notices the steel crucifix dangling from his opponent’s ear and brushing precariously against the lapel of the motorcyclist’s jacket. “That’s a dead cow you’re wearing!” he exclaims before he can restrain himself. To his disbelief the thug’s next shoulder punch collapses into a gentle pat.

“You’ve got me there, friend.” The biker moves on, his guffaws echoing through the tunnel as Paul catches his breath. Convinced that the coat has miraculous properties he vows not to remove it for the rest of the day. It is quiet down here in this corner of the plaza basement. A red neon tube clicks on and off in a dry cleaner’s window: 10% off on Leather and Suede. Dry cleaning, sniffs Paul, what a gimmick. He burrows into his musky-scented acquisition and laughs to himself. So this is how it feels to be literally “wrapped” in luxury, he thinks, surprised that he doesn’t feel in the least bit hypocritical, nor any urges to look down on others he has always associated with such wealthy accoutrements. He pinches the handles of the shopping bag, feeling a pang of guilt for the old black maxi rolled up inside.

Where am I going to get my hands on some cash? He is sick of the syrupy, newspaper ambiance of Chez Nana, its coterie of students, cabbies and loners hoisting donuts over chipped marble tables, losing themselves in its endless cacophony. Two days ago he spotted a college-age woman sitting in his favorite seat facing the counter. She looked about nineteen, wearing a scruffy denim pantsuit and scratched cowboy boots, loose blonde hair obscuring her eyes.

“Hi,” Paul eased into the seat next to her.

“Get out of my face,” she snapped in a low, tense voice.

“Got a cigarette?” he persisted, spying the edge of a Player’s package protruding from her purse.

“Get out of my face,” she repeated, brushing the hair out of her eyes. Paul, noting their cold, fed-up intensity, stood up and left the girl to her misery.

A mad thought enters his mind.  I’ve always wanted to eat at La Bistrette. He pictures himself waltzing into the restaurant he and his Chez Nana cronies reserve for their deepest jeers. With its marbled entrance and Perrier-lapping clientele, La Bistrette is the epitome of Yuppiedom. On the verge of collapse, Paul finally convinces himself that submerging himself within the enemy’s environment might well sharpen his quest for invisibility.

His first taste of laughter in many months provides him with the last burst of energy he needs to climb to the plaza’s third level. Wheezing, he inches past the gold on pink parchment calligraphy of La Bistrette’s “Please Wait to Be Seated” sign and jovially returns the stares of two women who are tucking money under next to their empty plates. Leave a tip for me, he smiles as he edges to a booth overlooking de Maisonneuve Boulevard.

“Voulez-vous du café, monsieur?” A waiter appears out of thin air and hovers over Paul. His fidgety mouth, wiry physique and coifed ponytail accentuate his instinctive disdain. Paul, mesmerized by the velvet carmine waistband separating the puff-sleeved shirt from dark mauve slacks, muffles a snicker. All this matador needs is a gold cape.

“Café, monsieur?” The whippet tilts his head in tandem with a bronze pot that reminds Paul of a funeral urn, his rehearsed purr flooded with contempt. Billy and Meatdog would be rolling in the aisles.

“Yeah, thanks,” Paul mimics the waiter’s sarcasm while trying to hide his hands. The waiter fills a white scalloped cup with fragrant dark liquid, deposits a menu on the table and wafts back toward the entrance. The sun is pouring through the window and Paul lets his gaze waft to the parked cars below, noting the frozen, misshaped bricks of black slush between them. People are rushing past, their bodies hunched over as they fight the cold. One man leaps out of the masses and rattles his torn mitts against the glass, almost directly in Paul’s face. It’s Spider, he realizes with a shudder, recognizing one of the Friday night sniffers he sometimes helps out. As the pudgy, wooly-haired man continues gesticulating, crossing his eyes and poking out his tongue, Paul slowly turns back to the menu. Let’s see just how invisible this coat can make me, he mutters to himself. What could I say to the guy anyway? These people would probably toss me out if they so much as saw me looking at him.

When Paul pulls open the menu he is unprepared for the tantalizing photographic banquet. Roast Beef, Roast Chicken, Quiche Lorraine, Seafood Pasta and other sumptuous offerings floating through a galaxy of chic moons and stars. What should I choose? His empty stomach goes into paroxysms and his dyslexia, however mild, was jumbling the letters together into an array that rivals the soaring planets. The turkey dinner soaring between Jupiter and Saturn ignites his suffering palate. He reaches for the scalloped coffee cup and forgetting to add cream, guzzles wildly.

“Have you decided, monsieur? Bacon, eggs, French toast, crêpes?” The whippet is back, his sarcasm in full bloom. Paul, nursing his burnt tongue, gestures to the turkey platter. “We are still serving breakfast, monsieur. The turkey entrée is not included in our morning menu. You might consider something from this section.” His pearly pen taps the left side of the menu whose Wake Up Milky Way is redolent in sun-dipped satellites. “I would recommend,” he simpers, “the eggs Benedict au Saumon, with lemon butter and patates juliennes. All of our breakfast platters come with fresh-squeezed tropical juice and a selection of pastries.”

“I’m allergic to fish,” snaps Paul. “If I can’t have the turkey, what’s it doing there?” His nicotine-rusted index finger pokes the menu as he realizes to his relief that Spider has moved his mad puppet act to another window.

“Perhaps,” the waiter looks over his shoulder and begins to scribble, “We can make an exception. Will you be considering a dessert with your meal?”

“Maaybe,” simpers Paul. He eyes the variety of pies orbiting an ad agency’s conception of Mars. “Got any apple pie à la mode?” Between the heavy coat and the radiator directly under his feet, he feels as if he is trapped in an oven. Why did I have to pick this bloody booth?  

“Sir, would you like me to take your coat to the vestiaire?”

“Oh no, no thanks. I’ve got—a condition. I’m freezing.” Why doesn’t the nosy weasel mind his business? “And while you’re at it, you can bring me some of your house wine.”    

“Wine? At this hour?”

“White wine. To go with the turkey. If it isn’t asking too much.”

“Yes, Sir.” The waiter rolls his eyes and breezes away. A few minutes later Paul can hear the whippet’s voice, low and snarling, arguing with somebody over shoving a turkey dinner into the microwave. What’s their problem? Paul presses himself more firmly into the orange vinyl of his booth. Nothing wrong with eating turkey at 11a.m. Or bacon and eggs at 11p.m., for that matter.

To Paul’s relief, the food arrives in a frenzy. Soup in a bowl with matching under-plate, along with hot rolls and butter packed in a basket lined with cream-colored linen. Before Paul can begin to contemplate the soup the waiter sets down a pink-rimmed dinner plate whose contents reflect the restaurant’s raison d’être: six lacy slices of turkey, two crumbly scoops of stuffing, a mound of peas and carrots, a crystal jigger of cranberry jelly and a sphere of mashed potato topped with a daisy of gravy. Paul shoves the magenta serviette into his collar, picks up a fork and begins devouring: a slab of turkey, a forkful of potato, a lump of stuffing. The rich food sends tremors through his body, its aromas and textures triggering ecstasy.

When his plate is scraped clean he tears open a bread roll and smears it with the contents of two butter packets. Who knows when I’ll eat again?  Soft, soft… he envisions the fresh dough in a baker’s floury hands, being slowly and lovingly kneaded and placed in a brick oven, all for his benefit.

The soup is hotter than the coffee. He didn’t tell me it was Scotch broth. He has managed to avoid Scotch broth, the canned version of which his mother served him every Sunday afternoon after church. Worst was the way the crushed saltine crackers dissolved with the greenish swill, until the whole mess congealed into a bowl of tepid, inedible blob. However, the barley in this version is firm and beige, the bouillon incomparable to the tepid ghoulish swill he remembers. Flakes of fresh parsley swim delicately on its pale surface. He spoons and gulps as if he expects the bowl to be snatched away and the clock melts deliciously toward noon.

When the waiter comes to collect the empty dishes Paul raises his hand. “More coffee please.” I feel as fat as the Pope. He smiles

“Oui, monsieur.” The apple pie is so hot the ball of ice cream is already forming a milky pool. The waiter refills his cup as Paul wolfs into the pie. Slow down, he reminds himself, savor its essence. “Will that be all, Sir?”

“Yeah, I think that will do it.” The waiter slides a bill next to an anorexic vase whose pink carnation is beginning to wilt. Twenty-four ninety-eight trumpets the piece of paper. Jesus help me. Paul’s mind lurches wildly as he recognizes the warning spasms of a migraine. There are three waitresses patrolling the booth next to the emergency exit, and a man in a three-piece suit is blocking the main entrance, gazing at his watch with irritable constancy.

Panic kindles in his veins as a vision rushes up into his mind, rupturing his equilibrium to the point where his mind separates from his body and perches somewhere along the ceiling. The subway cops appear and bear down on his booth, bandying their batons like May Day whirligigs. Paul sees himself being escorted out of La Bistrette by subway cops and dragged into the center of the nearby hockey stadium. “Crucify him!” thousands of animal rights activists surge out of his petrified subconscious. “Thief! Thief!  Make him pay!” The waiter, still wearing his whippet uniform, saunters out of the crowd and yanks the coat from his shoulders as the crowd bears down with spray cans of Tuscan red paint. “Make him pay!” As the first jets of red strike his body Paul raises his arms in a futile attempt at self-defense. “I’m not a thief!” His tormentors continue spraying him with the blood-colored paint until his entire body is red. His knees feel like rubber as the warning spasms erupt into a full-blown migraine.

The biker emerges from the crowd: “Animal killer. I warned you.”

Why did I do it? Am I going completely insane? His throat is constricted and his cheeks are hot. Christ, my life is nothing but a revolving prison sentence.

He rubs the acid perspiration from his forehead and tries to convince himself that his mind is not being ripped apart. Craving a cigarette, he fumbles in his pockets but is immediately deterred by the “No Smoking” signs recently installed throughout the plaza. He then remembers that his sole cancer stick in trapped in the right pocket of his old maxi coat. His foot brushes against the silvery shopping bag he pushed under the table when he sat down. Not worth the risk. He grips the edges of the table and pulls himself to a standing position, barely fortified by the sumptuous food he has consumed. He automatically scans the leftover dishes on a neighboring table. Is that a five-dollar bill? He slouches back in his seat and pretends to examine the scalloped texture of his coffee cup. Five bucks won’t begin to cover this. Three booths away, a mother and her two children are preparing to leave. He watches the woman pull three dollars from her purse and slip them onto a saucer.

Five and three make eight. Come on Jesus, you can do it. He remembers the night he agreed to accompany Meatdog’s harmonica with a tap dance in the McGill metro station. Desperation and hunger undermined his humility as the subway passengers stopped to gawk at his vermouth-induced sidestep. Meatdog got up to join him, sashaying his way through “Blue Skies” and laughing himself silly at his pal’s unintentional burlesque. Some joke, he marvels, that evening netted us two hundred bucks.

Four booths away, the two executives are preparing to leave. They’ll be good for seven, maybe ten. One of them removes a credit card from her vest pocket and slips it onto the bill tray. Damn plastic. He watches as the waiter returns with a credit slip. Her associate digs into her wallet and hands her some bills. Smiling, the first woman pockets the bills and the two of them prepare to leave. Damned executives.

His lips are dry and the taste of blood has returned to his mouth. Eight down, seventeen to go. That waiter doesn’t deserve a tip anyway. The waiters and waitresses are preoccupied with their tips and coffee. Come on Jesus, just send me that last ten so I can get the hell out of here. Who will Meatdog have to protect him if I go to jail? What if Billy has an overdose? I promise, if I get out of this in one piece, I’ll...

He reaches instinctively into the coat’s vest pocket for his comb. Oh God, I must have left it in the old maxi coat along with my smoke. What’s this? He pulls out a bundle of crisp, folded paper: an adrenaline bomb erupts throughout his system. These are hundred dollar bills! One, two, three...five hundred dollars! Holy Christ!

With as much diplomacy as he can muster, he places the five-dollar bill back on the table where he found it and saunters over to the cashier. “We hope you enjoyed your meal, Monsieur,” the woman smiles. When she hands him the change for one of the hundred dollar bills, he finds it nearly impossible to contain his trembling. He walks back to his table where the whippet is already clearing the remnants of his feast. He places two dollars next to a saucer. “Next time, have a little more respect,” he snaps, vaguely attempting to emulate one of the executives.

As he makes his way back into the plaza, he loosens the coat and gasps as his overheated body responds to its first waft of cool air since he entered the building. Workers throughout the cavernous plaza are dismantling a plywood version of Santa’s castle. Two women are forking artificial hay onto the plaza floor while another hammers yellow doors onto a barn painted with cartoon rabbits. Rush rush—what’s the big hurry? 

As Paul steps on to the escalator leading to the main level he catches a glimpse of himself in a mirrored pillar. One of these days I’ll invest in a rug. His loose right boot inadvertently kicks a sign propped near the fountain: win a sports car—help the hungry. A clown in baggy bloomers and orange trench coat is wheeling around the fountain on a ten-foot high unicycle, waving large gold tickets in his oversized yellow gloves. “Win a brand new car,” he chants flamboyantly, spinning up to Paul: “Un billet, monsieur? All proceeds go to Maison Secours!”

Paul discerns a jaded grimace behind the clown’s maroon-painted grin. Forgetting that he is wearing the luxurious coat he flails his arms: “What do I look like, a billionaire?  Maybe you should pay a visit to that place, try to drink the watery cocoa they pass off as coffee there.” He breaks into a raunchy cackle as the puzzled clown performs a sidespin and pedals back to the center of the plaza.

The noon sunlight nearly blinds him as Paul marches through the disintegrating slush, remembering to keep a tight grip on the metallic shopping bag. He veers onto Saint Catherine Street where Bonjour Breakfast’s posters of bacon and eggs have been replaced by placards of afternoon hotdogs, burgers and French fries. His fingers tremble through the depths of his satin-lined pockets and he vows to give his old maxi to Meatdog the next time he sees him.

~

© 1984 Sonja A. Skarstedt
[Appeared in The Nashwaak Review Vol. 5]