For Bryanna

“We gladly feast on those who would subdue us.”

Addams Family credo

Chapter 1

Halfway through the televised debate I kick my boot into the screen. Even on mute I can’t stand it. It feels good to smash the TV though. I feel like I’m participating in the political system. The candidate’s head vanishes in a shower of glass and noise, and I stand there wondering why I let my belief that violence only makes things worse prevent me from being violent.

It’s noon.

Before he left, Chris made me promise to leave before his boyfriend gets home. That means I have six hours to calm down, call Richard, and convince him to drive me into a straight neighbourhood so we can steal a replacement TV.

I used to steal from heterosexuals for political reasons. Anything owned by a straight white yuppie was bought with oppression. The hetero-normative ownership paradigm is a tyrant belief system that deserves to be undermined on every front, from political protest to petty thievery.

Now I’m a little more honest about it. I can admit that I steal from straight people because I just don’t like them. I made myself a T-shirt that says, “I break into heterosexual houses so I can masturbate in heterosexual kitchens.”

The TV belongs to Chris’s boyfriend, and so I shouldn’t have broken it. But I promised myself that if the talking-head thing said, “Of course we should be tolerant of the gays,” one more time I would kick in the TV, and if you can’t trust your own word, what can you trust?

Richard answers on the first ring, and I say, “Where are you? I need you to drive me somewhere.” I can hear a sound in the background — the low repeated clunking of a headboard is my guess. “Who answers the phone in the middle of fucking?” I say, and Richard just laughs.

The voice in the background says, “Who is it?” and I hear Richard say something. The boy asks, “What’s he wearing?”

“What are you wearing?” Richard asks, and that’s that. A half an hour wasted on mediocre phone sex.

I think about Chris while I listen to Richard’s overacting. Last night, fucking Chris, I thought about Richard. It doesn’t matter what I fantasize about these days. All that matters is that it’s something different from what I’m doing.

I probably won’t ever find out who Richard’s fucking, and I don’t care. The boy’s a prop, just some mouth around Richard’s dick as I pull myself off on the other end of the phone. A half an hour. Chris’s boyfriend will be here in five and a half hours now. Richard says he’s on his way over and he hangs up.

The boyfriend has a separate dresser from Chris, and I dig through it looking for a clean sock, wipe myself off, and fold it nicely back in with the others. There’s no TV, so to kill time I get out the phone book and flip it open randomly. The first name is Hubert, J.

“Good afternoon,” I say, “I’m sorry to bother you during the lunch hour, ma’am, but I wonder if you’d like to take a survey in exchange for a free dinner for two at a local restaurant.”

“What restaurant?” she says, and there’s hesitation in her voice, like she thinks maybe it’s a trick. Maybe it’s dinner for two at McDonald’s, something beneath her. “I’m right in the middle of lunch,” she says.

“Any restaurant in the city limits,” I tell her.

“Okay.”

“Are you married?” I ask. “Sorry, are you happily married?”

“I am.”

“True or false,” I say, “a man should never hit a woman.”

“True,” she says without hesitation. I pause a moment like I’m taking note of her answer. In reality, I’m sitting on the edge of Chris’s dining room table leaving smudge marks. He’s uptight about it: Always use a coaster. Always use a coaster.

“Wrong,” I say into the phone. “No. No. No. Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that gender is an illusion? I mean, what if a pussy little faggot punched one of those chunked-up bodybuilder girls with a clit like a three-foot cock? I mean, that right there is vagina-dentata night terrors three feet from being realized, isn’t it?”

“Excuse me?” she says, but I’m getting into it. I wonder where Richard is, and whether we’ll fuck later. I picture the woman I’m talking to, sitting at her kitchen table while I push Richard down by the shoulder and pull open my belt. I picture her skinny Botox face with a Desperate Housewives smile while she watches Richard take me in his mouth and she clucks her tongue. On the phone, she’s saying “Excuse me?” again.

“Gender isn’t a dichotomy,” I say. “Sometimes a baby’s born and it’s a boy, and sometimes it’s a girl, sure, but sometimes a doctor is in the background behind one of those pull-around curtains, flipping a coin. Sometimes the mother says, ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ and the doctor really does say, ‘Yes.’ That isn’t the punchline to a joke, Mrs. Hubert, it’s the punchline to the whole misguided notion that the concept of boy and the concept of girl are anything more than constructions.”

There’s silence on the other end of the phone.

“How many loads of laundry would you say you do each week?” I ask, but she’s already hung up on me. It doesn’t matter. Outside, Richard is honking his horn. I hang up the phone and check my fly. She won’t think about what I said at all. Her husband will come home, and she won’t even remember to say, “We got a crank call today.” I don’t know why I waste my time.

I get all the way to the door and decide to call her back, give it one last try. Mrs. Hubert. I pick up the phone and press redial.

“Hello?” she answers, and I pause. I hate her for the fact that I know she’ll hang up, but I hate her more because there is a chance she won’t.

“When I pluck my eyebrows, I’m becoming more of a woman,” I say. “When you stop plucking yours, you become less of a woman. When I fuck a man, or his boyfriend,” I say, “and my chest is shaved, and my eyebrows are plucked, and his expensive underwear is pulled aside so that his cock springs free into my mouth, what do you have? Is gender really just tits?”

“Who is this?” the woman says.

“And women who develop breast cancer, who have their tits cut off, who wear the same breast-form fakes as I do when I’m all dressed up, are they less than women?”

She hangs up and my anger is confused because I don’t know what I believe anymore myself. If that’s what gender is, just an illusion, then why don’t I fuck women?

In the car, Richard wants to know where we’re going.

“We’re going to break into a house and steal a fancy TV,” I say. “I want to get something shiny and digital and at least thirty-seven inches. We’re size-queen burglars, and we’re after something so new and expensive that it’ll make us think about getting real jobs.”

“I’ve got a job,” Richard says as the car starts.

I ignore him. Richard works at the phone company, doing technical support for a bunch of broadband-internet customers. He brings home big paycheques week after week and uses them to fund his “deviant” lifestyle. He doesn’t need to steal things, the way I do, but he likes it. That’s part of his charm.

We’re walking up the driveway to this two-storey arts-and-crafts style and Richard says, “So we’re replacing the TV so the boyfriend doesn’t know you were there?”

I nod.

“Won’t the boyfriend notice that it’s a different TV?”

“So it’s an apology present,” I say. At the front door, I reach out and ring the doorbell. No answer. We turn our backs to the door like we’re just casually waiting for someone to answer, and we look around the neighbourhood. Nobody watering their lawns or staring out their windows at us. We walk around the house.

Out back we climb the steps to the deck and Richard lies on his back in the sun while I slide out my lockpicks and get to work. “I thought you were supposed to be at work this morning?” I say as I select a pick.

Richard laughs.

“You couldn’t hear us slamming the photocopier into the wall?”

I can picture it — the photocopier’s lid breaking off, cheap and plastic under their hard and violent bodies. Sex is always better when you’re breaking something.

I learned to pick locks from the MIT guide to picking locks. I found it on the internet, and you can tell it was written by the sort of queer that doesn’t like the word queer. The whole thing is prefaced by an ethics statement, again and again apologizing for being a guide to picking locks. Explaining and apologizing, like those fuckers I’m always seeing on TV talking about gay marriage, about being in love and being just like straight people, just as monogamous and sexually repressed.

I ordered the pick set off the internet. I’m having trouble concentrating on which pins are set, because I keep picturing Richard fucking the mailroom boy on the photocopier.

“I thought it was a headboard,” I say. Then the lock is open, and I turn the knob. “We’re in.”

Richard has his shirt pulled up so the sun can get at his chest, and he lies there for a minute in silence before he acknowledges hearing me.

“All right,” he says, sitting up. “Let’s do this shit.”

I love how he talks like that, like we’re TV criminals, about to “do a job.” It makes me want to bring pantyhose to pull down over our faces, but that shit can ruin a perfectly good pair of hose.

There are kids’ toys all over the wall-to-wall carpet and there are tasteful clocks and paintings and a decent microwave-fridge-stove kitchen set. The whole kitchen is chrome, and I wish we’d brought a truck. Standing in the doorway, I feel like going upstairs and getting all the clothes and papers and hidden pornography and dumping it in the back of a moving truck. I feel like stealing their house. They come home and I’m making some popcorn and watching pornography on their television.

I get to work, looking through the silverware, and Richard starts picking up the toys and putting them in a plastic toy box near the wall. The family will come home to a clean house and a missing TV. Richard’s fingerprints will be all over everything, and mine will too.

Already I can see my fingerprints on the cutlery, and I press my index finger to the wide blade of a butter knife. The oils from my skin leave a perfect fingerprint. They’ve got expensive silverware, but it’s heavy and kind of tacky so I leave it.

Richard puts the last toy in the box and looks at the TV. It’s a flat screen and more expensive than my rent would be if I paid rent instead of living on people’s couches. “That’ll fit in the trunk for sure,” he says. “Let’s look around first.”

We have some time.

Upstairs the master bedroom has a big replica of David’s Marat, naked hand hanging down beside the stone bath, holding the pen. There’s a nightstand on each side of the bed. His side has a journal and a pencil and a Tom Clancy novel. There’s a hair laid across the journal.

I flip it open randomly and read. Good wife, good kids, good life. It used to be you could count on breaking into some house and exposing the dark underbelly of the middle-class lifestyle. I mean, it’s all they ever make movies about anymore, isn’t it? Now they’ve got a cocktail of pills to get rid of middle-class angst. I flip to the last page and pick up the pencil.

Maybe the police will get a handwriting analyst to examine the note I leave behind: “We were going to watch some hardcore gay pornography and leave quietly, but you didn’t have any so we took the TV with us.”

I wonder what kind of person it’ll say I am. See how the letters are all above the line here? That’s arrogance. Or self-confidence. Or a big cock. It’s hard to tell. Also, who prints anymore? Was it some grade-school kid who doesn’t know how to write cursive?

I close the journal and carefully replace the hair.

Richard yells, “Hey, get in here,” from the closet. It’s a walk-in, and there’s a whole wall of shoes. “These aren’t very well organized,” he says. He picks a pair up off the floor and gets to work.

I sit behind him on the floor and watch.

“I heard you slept with a woman,” I say.

I watch as his organizing slows briefly and then speeds up.

“You too, huh?” he says. “Fuck, man. You’re the one who said that gender was just made up, weren’t you? Sometimes you get so drunk that an ass is an ass. I was out at a party full of straight people, and it was either go home with this seventeen-year-old girl with her face all tattooed who wouldn’t stop spouting politics at me, or follow one of the guys home in the car and try to find some bushes with a good view. I’ve got nothing against frigging myself in the bushes,” he adds, “but this girl had me convinced. She was just a talker, man. An ass is an ass.”

I’m nodding even though he can’t see me. “Are you going to see her again?” I ask, and Richard thinks a minute before nodding.

“What if I am?” he says. “Are you gonna give me the talk I got from Rob, about how I’m just too scared to live a gay lifestyle, and I’m subconsciously seeking the security you get from sticking your dick in a woman?”

“Nah.” I stand up and head for the door. “I just think we should start bringing more people when we do stuff like this. We should start finding people we trust, and a seventeen-year-old with facial tattoos who gets off on convincing fags to fuck her sounds like my kind of girl.” I pause in the doorway and grin. “Not that I’d fuck her,” I say.

He throws a shoe at me, but I’m already gone.

Downstairs I unplug the TV and DVD player and roll up the cords. There’s a plastic bag in the kitchen big enough for the player. Richard comes downstairs and we look around one last time before we pick up the TV and carry it outside. There’s a kid on a skateboard trying to ollie in the street beside the car.

On the drive back to Chris’s apartment, Richard tells me he’s got plans to crash a high school student-council party tonight with that tattooed girl and some of her friends.

“I know you were dead set on showing up at the lesbian ball,” he says, “but if you change your mind, you should come.”

I’m already nodding. A high school party. How can I turn down the chance to break some young boy’s heart for the first time?

Chris’s boyfriend is there when we arrive, standing in the doorway with a frown. I smile as wide as I can and offer my hand. Richard is carrying the TV himself, his arms wrapped around it.

“You must be Chris’s boyfriend,” I say, and he tentatively shakes my hand. “I’m one of the guys Chris has been fucking while he waits for you to come to your senses and realize that monogamy turns love into an ownership thing.”

He pulls his hand away and Richard sets the TV down. Chris’s boy is just staring at it, and I hand him the plastic bag with the DVD player and cords.

“You’ve been sleeping with Chris?” he says, and I grin.

“Yes, sir,” I say. “And it’s just great.” I turn to follow Richard back to the car, but pause. “Oh, there might be a serial number or something on the bottom there,” I say. “If you ever sell it or anything, you should get rid of the number. It’ll probably be in a police database by tomorrow.”

And that’s that. In the car Richard is already talking about the party, and this girl, Alex, and her friends whose names I’m already forgetting. We’re gonna hit the lesbian ball first, dressed in suits and fake moustaches, freshly shaved and calling ourselves drag kings. There’s nothing more satisfying than going out as a drag king and having the girl at the door roll her eyes at you because she doesn’t think you pass. I live for that moment.

I roll down the window and stick my hand out, giving a family in a minivan the finger, but really just enjoying the feel of wind over my skin.

Chapter 2

My drag-king name is Prag Titmouse, which nobody asks for anyway. The moustache doesn’t itch anymore because it’s just as sweaty as the rest of me. Richard and I are right in the thick of it, with all these girls packed onto the dance floor. I’ve had two doubles already, and I’m getting over that nervous feeling I have around lesbians. I love the music: angry dyke punk rock. I’m jumping up and down with my hands in fists.

A blond girl with long hair and those thick-rimmed glasses that men are always wearing in diamond commercials pushes between us, taking Richard by the tie and pulling him close. She kisses him and he kisses her back, watching me out of the corner of his eye. His face is bright red, and I start laughing and pull her off him. We used to play “See how many lesbians you can French kiss before one of them figures out you’re a boy.”

I pull him off the blonde and kiss him myself. I love the feeling in the pit of my stomach, with the dyke punk shaking her head and Richard’s hand on the front of my pants, squeezing me while the girl watches. These are my people, queer and out of control. That feeling lasts for a minute while Richard and I feel each other up, but I notice the girl still standing there. She’s sneering, uninterested in gender play. She can’t understand why a drag king would be into another king, and not some femme bimbo. She has no idea.

The feeling’s gone, and I remember how closed-minded most of the faggots I know are. Richard wants to go to the bathroom and fuck, but I’m ready to leave. The music has stopped for a bit, and there’s a girl up onstage, reading her poetry for the lesbian ball talent show. I want to get up onstage too and make an ass of myself in front of a pulsing crowd of lesbians who won’t be happy to suddenly find a man in their club. I’m not even drunk yet. I want to pull a magic trick, walk onstage as a girl in boys’ clothing, nothing up my sleeve, and pull a cock out of my pants. Voila!

The girl who introduces the talent-show competitors is named Michelle, and she’s standing against the bar and talking with the bartender. She’s got her head shaved and lines carved into her eyebrows like she still thinks it’s ’93. I walk over, leaving Richard with the blonde who won’t give up, and introduce myself. Firm handshake, eye contact. I play up being a man, so she thinks I’m not.

“Prag,” I tell her, and she laughs out loud. She’s got an explosive, ugly, fucked-up laugh. She spits out the ice cubes that she’s been chewing.

“Your name or your designation?” she asks, and I grin.

“It depends on what kind of mood I’m in,” I tell her. “You the girl that can get me up onstage to read some poetry?” and she nods.

“What you got?” she asks, and I tap the side of my head. “Come on,” she says, “let’s hear it.”

“I only really feel comfortable up onstage,” I say. “I feel like my poems are meant to connect with a wide spectrum of feminine energy, and I tend to get embarrassed when I read them one-on-one.” I try to look embarrassed, but Michelle is nodding. Did she roll her eyes? I hope so.

“No, totally,” she says. “I’ll get you up after the next girl.”

Richard appears beside me and takes my hand. His fingers are sweaty against my knuckles.

“Can we go soon?” he asks, and I nod.

“We’ll be leaving very shortly,” I say into his ear. “Trust me.”

Soon Michelle is up onstage and pointing at me. I make my way through the crowd and climb up beside her, in front of the microphone. There are a couple of catcalls, and I smile. Michelle gives me a kiss on the cheek, and she steps down into the crowd again.

I’m under the lights and sweating already. This is childish and stupid, I know. How long have I been pulling shit like this? What will it even prove? But I see Richard grinning in the audience, his lips wet and his eyes inviting, and I know that when we get out of here he’ll tell me how awesome he thought it was, and we’ll fuck in the back of his car.

So I pull my shirt open and tear the moustache free. Without the moustache on my lip, my face is still masculine, and it becomes apparent that it wasn’t that little bit of hair constructing me. I haven’t changed, but I have. I’m not wearing an undershirt and I don’t have breasts. Girls are already yelling “Boo” at the stage, and I can see a big security guard headed my way through the crowd.

“My name’s Prag Titmouse,” I say, “and my poem is called ‘What the Hell Is Wrong with Lesbians, Because Cock Is Awesome.’ I hope you like it.” I pause and clear my throat. Michelle is there at the edge of the stage, the only face that’s laughing. I smile at her. “What the hell is wrong with lesbians?” I say. “Because cock is awesome. The end.”

I jump off the stage and grab Richard’s hand. Michelle is right there and says something I can’t hear. I grab her hand too. Richard’s eyes are wide, but he’s smiling as he runs beside me. We all take a path that lands us some kicks and punches from the girls we pass, but gets us to the door and avoids the bouncers. In the street outside I’m shaking with laughter. Michelle is still saying something, but I’m near deaf. We run for a couple of blocks, until we’re sure that nobody is following us.

I’ve got that feeling back, like I’m a part of something queer and strong and worthwhile. When I read about “the movement” in the paper, or see queers interviewed on TV, I don’t feel like a part of it, I don’t feel like I’m represented by that toned-down image they’ve created to help straight people “tolerate” us. I’m a part of something more honest.

I’m a part of that smile of recognition I get from the store clerk when he realizes I’m gay too; I’m a part of that smile on his face as he looks the other way and I slide a book into my jacket. Richard and Michelle are too. I feel so close to them right now, I want to fuck the air.

“Goddamn it,” Richard says, leaning against a car. He’s laughing, out of breath. “Goddamn it,” he says again.

Michelle is shaking, and I stick my hand out to shake. Another firm handshake, this time as myself and not a girl faking it, and Richard gives her his too. He’s still in costume.

“We’re going to crash a high school party,” I tell her, and Richard gives me a strange look. I know he wants to fuck in the car, but I shrug at him in return and smile. Plenty of time for that later. He shrugs too, but looks a little disappointed. He’ll get over it. I want to have some fun tonight. “Are you down?” I ask Michelle. We’re walking again.

“Sure,” she says, then looks over her shoulder, the way we came. “I can’t go back there tonight anyway. They’re going to think I was in on it.” She smiles. “I wish I was. What are we doing at this party?” We’re at Richard’s car, and he pulls his keys out.

“Breaking hearts,” Richard says, pulling open his car door. “Maybe making friends.”

We climb in, and Michelle gives us her backstory. She only works part-time at the dyke bar, just a way to meet girls. She moved here from up north because she was tired of the cold, tired of living in a town with fifteen lesbians who had each other on speed dial.

“It’s hard to look good when you’re wearing a parka half the time,” she says. Richard nods. He’s from up north too — further north than her, I’ll bet. “I’ve just been kicking around since I got here.” Michelle lights a cigarette. “Sleeping around a bit and trying to avoid the drama. I work part-time to pay the rent and buy my groceries, and spend the rest of my time doing what I want.” She laughs and corrects herself. “Doing who I want.”

Richard’s friend Alex meets us in the parking lot of her high school. A dance is just letting out, and severe-looking men and women — her teachers, I’m guessing — stand at the door and watch the kids leave. Alex looks sharp, wearing a suit like ours, and her facial tattoos are impressive in their sheer size. She’s got thick black rectangles crossing her cheekbones.

“So here’s the plan,” Alex says as soon as she’s in the car. “I pick a boy and start flirting with him.” She’s talking to Richard now. “I pretend I’m drunk and easily taken advantage of, and he gets all blood-drained-from-his-head and takes me upstairs.” Richard is driving, watching the road, but Michelle and I are leaning forward. “He lets me blindfold him . . .”

“And then Richard fucks him,” I say, and I’m grinning like an idiot. “Or sucks him off. He does it instead of you, but the boy doesn’t know.” Alex is looking at me now, for the first time. “He’s blindfolded, and getting the blow job of his life, and until he opens his eyes, nothing is wrong. Everything is perfect because in his head it’s perfect.”

Alex turns back to Richard. “Imagine the look on his face,” she says, “when he finds out it was a guy instead of a girl sucking him off. Imagine how angry he’ll be.”

Richard is still watching the road.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he says. “There’s not really any consent involved there, is there? When he opens his eyes and sees the two of us there, he’s going to feel taken advantage of, used. Won’t he?”

I snort and lean forward again. “It’s like gender play,” I say. “You’re a girl, sucking him off. You’re Alex for that ten minutes on your knees, because all Alex is to him is a mouth. And, Richard, if an ass is an ass, then a mouth is a mouth.” Richard blushes and glances sideways at Alex. I realize that those were her words and not his, that he was just repeating them. “You’re not a boy until he opens his eyes, and then what does he do? He’s just had an amazing orgasm in your mouth. He’s been moaning about how fucking awesome you are, and now that’s all recontextualized. He has to go back and reinterpret everything that just happened, with a faggot sucking him off while he bucks and moans. It’s perfect.”

Michelle hasn’t said anything, and I give her a sidelong look. She’s watching me quietly, on her second cigarette. Alex is turned around in her seat now, facing me.

“If Richard won’t do it,” she says, “will you?” and I nod.

“I’m better at it than he is anyway.” I grin, and Richard shakes his head.

“Fuck off. I’ll do it,” he says. “Now tell me what exit we’re taking.”

At the party Richard goes off with Alex to deflower a high school boy, and Michelle and I find a spot near the keg and sit down. “SpongeBob is totally a fag,” a boy next to us says, and the whole group of drunk kids are laughing. “He’s always hanging out with that fucking pink thing. He’s a bum boy.” He says all this with a fake lisp and Michelle rolls her eyes, but I turn around to face them.

“Who else is gay?” I say. “Tinky Winky’s gay, right? That purple Teletubby?”

“Yeah.” The boy nods. “And Batman and Robin have got to be gay. Come on.”

“That Hanna-Barbera cat thing,” says a girl. She pauses to think of the name. “Snagglepuss. He’s a total queer.”

Michelle turns to look at the girl. It looks like she wants to say something, but before she does, someone cuts in.

“Bert and Ernie,” he says. It’s a boy with a T-shirt that says something in binary code on it. He’s got his glasses taped at the corners, even though they’re obviously brand new. “Probably Oscar the Grouch too. He was like a bitter old faggot. Kermit the Frog’s little nephew.” He adjusts his glasses with a practised move. “They should form a team and fight crime.”

I almost laugh out loud. Brilliant. Before I can say anything to Michelle, she’s standing up.

“Let’s go see how Richard’s doing,” she says. She takes my hand and helps me up from the couch. My mind is flooded with images of cartoon characters and Muppets, gay terrorist comic-book heroes. Halfway up the stairs we can hear a boy yelling, “What the fuck?” over and over. “What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck.” Michelle starts running and I follow.

Two boys have got Richard on the ground, and they’re kicking him. They’re not doing a very good job of it, because they’re so drunk, but they’re trying really hard. Another boy is holding Alex back, but she is giving him a hell of a struggle. Michelle is on top of them before I’m even at the top stair, and she is all elbows and knees. Alex breaks free and suddenly the tides have turned. I’m not into the violence; I’m too busy thinking.

I help Richard up, and he doesn’t have any bruises on his face or anything. He’s holding his side, and I say, “You all right?” and he nods. “Anything broken?” I say, and he shakes his head. “Good, because I have an idea.”

“What?” Richard looks around at the fight that surrounds us. “Is your idea to get the fuck out of here?”

“Nope. You know how everyone jokes that Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street are gay? What if we got ourselves some masks, and became Bert and Ernie? What if we took the ridiculous idea that characters on a children’s show are gay, that they are a threat to ‘traditional family values,’ and we made it come true?”

“You mean, like, put on the Bert and Ernie mask and fuck somewhere in public?” he says, and I shake my head.

“No, I mean put on our Bert and Ernie masks and videotape ourselves breaking into people’s homes and leaving pro-gay children’s books on their kids’ bookshelves. You and me and Alex and Michelle, assuming the identities of gay cartoon characters and going out every night to threaten ‘traditional family values’ as best we can. Breaking into a television station and changing the Saturday-morning cartoon programming? Pirate TV without all the expensive equipment.”

Michelle has stopped punching the guy nearest me and looks up. The guy looks unconscious. I’ve never seen someone beaten unconscious before. That’s lesbians for you.

“What good will that do?” she says. “We’re just giving weight to their arguments, aren’t we? I mean, there are people on TV accusing us of doing just that all the time — corrupting children.”

Alex is in the background somewhere, yelling, “And he fucking liked it. Ask him.”

“So why don’t we do it for real?” I say, and I help Richard to his feet. “We aren’t gonna talk these people into liking us. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. They’re bigots through and through.”

Richard is grinning now.

“But we can brainwash their kids,” he says, finishing my thought. “Why aren’t we trying to recruit? We get accused of it all the time anyway. I’m in. Dibs on Ernie.”

I look at Michelle, and she still looks wary.

“Well,” she says. “I don’t know. Who would I be? What lesbian cartoon characters are there?” Alex comes up behind her and slides her arm around Michelle’s shoulders. “She-Ra? Was She-Ra gay?” Michelle says. “Is that even a recognizable mask? They’ll think it’s Bert and Ernie and a couple of random girls in masks.”

Alex shakes her head.

“There are tons of dyke characters,” she says. “I’ll be Wonder Woman and you can be Velma from Scooby-Doo. And just so people can tell what the masks are, we’ll wear those five-dollar plastic kid costumes too. People will figure it out.”

We make our way downstairs and through a house full of sullen, staring teenagers. I notice that Richard stops holding his side until we’re outside.

In the doorway Alex stops and turns to face them all.

“Thanks for everything, guys,” she says. “See you in class!” She runs down the driveway and climbs into the car. “Where can we get masks at this hour?” she says. “Can we start tonight?”

Chapter 3

Richard’s cell rings at eight, and it’s Chris asking to talk to me. “I’m not here,” I whisper. Richard relays the message, and I think about what a disaster it would be if I tried to get Chris involved in this cartoon-fag terrorism thing. He’s probably already thinking about getting rid of the TV we stole for him, terrified he’ll get arrested somehow. Richard turns the phone off and falls back asleep.

I lie there and think about Chris. His contacts at the newspaper would be good for publicity, but his guilty conscience would do us in. I took him with me to church, six months ago, on a day when the topic was “The Problem of Homosexual Indoctrination.” We stayed in the parking lot, and I slit every tire on every car. Chris gave his own sermon, on the unhealthiness of anger.

I gave him a stack of flyers for a roadside-assistance service. It was run by a man who funded anti-gay-marriage commercials on TV and in the newspapers. The slogan at the top of his flyer was “Let Us Help.” One went on the windshield of every slashed car.

Chris didn’t appreciate the beauty of turning our enemies against one another. “They aren’t our enemies,” he said on the subway home. “They’re human beings, just like you and me.”

“I think they’d disagree about the ‘you and me’ part,” I said.

No, Chris isn’t going to get involved in this. Richard is asleep beside me, and I climb out of the bed as softly as I can. Slitting a few tires and inciting a few angry phone calls is nothing compared to what these people deserve. I’m tired of the moral high ground. We’ve already got more than our share of Gandhis in “the movement.” We need a General Patton.

No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor bastard die for his country.

My underpants are hanging from the bathroom doorknob. My hair’s probably standing at all angles because I fell asleep with it wet. In the morning light I feel all riled up. I want to run down to the lobby of the building and out into the street. Instead I lean over Richard’s sleeping body and kiss his cheek. He looks so peaceful. I should reach under the blankets and wake him up properly.

But I don’t. I take his phone and head for the balcony.

I should have written down Mrs. Hubert’s telephone number yesterday. If anyone in the straight world is capable of understanding, it’s going to be the frustrated housewife, isn’t it? I hate that I feel the need to try to explain. I find a phone book.

A man answers.

“Hello?” he says.

His voice is dark and quiet, and I have it all right there in my head. I want to say, “Love and sex are separate things, sir. Don’t you feel trapped sometimes by the guilt-enforced monogamy of your marriage?”

I open my mouth, but fail to say, “When you lie down with your wife one night, the third Wednesday of the month or whatever your sex schedule is like in fifteen years, and you realize that the drugs have stopped working, are you going to regret not being able to fuck your wife anymore, or are you going to regret not sticking it where you wanted when you still had the chance? Regret is an ugly thing.”

Instead I listen to him breathe, and he hangs up the phone. I’ll try again around noon. I call the number Michelle wrote on a napkin for me, and it rings and rings and nobody answers. I check the number and dial again.

“What?” she says. Her voice is muffled, but it’s definitely Michelle.

“Hey,” I say, “did I wake you?”

“No, we were just getting up. We’re going to have some breakfast and then head down to try and find some masks.” In the background I hear Alex saying, “Is that them? Hey! Death to the cartoon heterosexual paradigm!” And I laugh because I totally forgot about our war cry. Michelle continues, unfazed: “You and Richard are going to get the books? Do you want to meet around six tonight?” Alex is still yelling in the background, “Smash the straight cartoon state!”

“Yeah,” I say. I’m glad Michelle is involved. She’s got a good head on her shoulders. The way she laid into those high school boys with her knees and elbows was like a graceful lesbian Muay Thai fighter, and she acted without a second thought. She has her reservations, but she isn’t going to let that keep her from taking part.

“All right, we’ll give you a call on Richard’s cell when we’ve got our disguises. Alex thinks we should shoplift the masks, so that nobody can put our faces to a Wonder Woman and Velma costume when the police start following up leads.”

“That’s a good plan,” I say. “She’s shoplifted before?”

“My understanding,” Michelle says, “is that she’s an old pro.” Alex laughs in the background. “Mickey Mouse is a closet case! Minnie is his beard! Out of the closet and into the streets of the Magic Kingdom, you chickenshit mouse faggot!”

“I’ll talk to you tonight then,” I say, and I hang up.

Alex is pretty great too. Enthusiastic anyway. When Richard wouldn’t go through with the plan at the party, Alex tried to talk him into it right there. The blindfolded boy heard her whispering and started yelling for his friends. Michelle and I showed up just after they did.

We went for drinks after the party, and she wouldn’t let Richard off the hook for backing down. He said, “It just wasn’t right. It felt too much like rape.” Alex pointed out that he got his ass kicked anyway.

In retrospect, the non-consensual nature of the thing does make me uncomfortable. I got so wrapped up in the idea of turning the boy’s gender expectations on their head that . . . Well, fuck it. I’m glad Richard didn’t do it, and I told him so.

Now I’m sitting on the balcony and watching as the city moves with morning energy. Richard wants to pay out of his own pocket for this elementary school action we have planned; I want to steal the money. I want to break into another hetero’s house and take something we can sell, but he’s got it in his head that the money behind these children’s books should be clean money, should be pure somehow. We fought about this last night.

I gave in. We both have different ways of doing things, and if I’m honest with myself I have to admit his way is more noble. He’ll feel good about spending some of his money on these books for children instead of on pornography and me. Also, giving in on this is my way of telling him he was right about the blow-job thing with the blindfolded high school kid.

When Richard wakes up I hustle him out the door without breakfast. “We’ll eat out,” I say as we climb into the car. The first bookstore we go to is in the city, a big chain outlet. We need at least thirty copies of the book and a chain’s the only place we’re likely to find that kind of stock, but it still makes me uncomfortable.

There’s a lineup to the in-store coffee shop, and we start looking around for a children’s book with gay-enough pictures. There’re two books in the whole store, and Richard doesn’t like them.

“This book doesn’t even say the kid’s uncle is gay. He’s just got his hand around the guy’s shoulder, and the little girl is saying, ‘I love you anyway, Uncle Jeff!’ It could be a children’s book about coming to terms with an uncle who has a shoulder fetish. I don’t think we’re going to find anything here.”

I nod, but I’ve caught the eye of a clerk two aisles over. He’s tall and blond and his glasses are prissy as heck. I wink.

“What we need,” I say to Richard, “is a book called something like Grandpa’s Gay! Maybe I Should Be Too. But I don’t think those make it past the editors very often, do they?” The clerk is closer now, and he nods his head toward the bathroom. I nod back and Richard looks over his shoulder to see what I’m nodding at. “I’ll just be a minute,” I say, and he shrugs and picks up another book to flip through.

In the bathroom I pull off the clerk’s uniform shirt and put it on over my own T-shirt. He’s got a nice chest, and he shaves it. I certainly don’t mind. He has the key to the bathroom, and he locks us in, so we don’t have to squeeze into a stall. I push him back against the door and my finger presses the bumps around his nipple. He goes straight for my belt, a gentleman.

While he sucks me, I’m running my hand through his hair and doing this fake voice the whole time: “Good afternoon, is there anything I can help you find today?” and “Good evening, sir, did you know about our storewide sale today? Everything is ten percent off. Also, we do blow jobs. Would you like a blow job?” I pause and let out a small moan of encouragement. “We’re very good at it,” I say. He has to stop a couple of times because he’s laughing too hard.

We exchange numbers, and I give him a kiss on the cheek. Richard’s waiting outside and, without any emotion at all, he watches the guy walk past and sizes him up. “There’s nothing here,” he says.

Back in the car, I say, “I don’t think we’re going to find what we need.”

“What about my brother?” Richard says. “He’s a pretty good cartoonist. Couldn’t we get him to illustrate fifteen or twenty pages for us? We could print up our own books, about anything we want. Grandpa’s Gay! Maybe I Should Be Too. And that way we can control the message completely.”

It’s not a bad idea.

“You’ll write it?” I say, and Richard is nodding.

“Yeah, or we can all write it tonight.” He smiles and turns back to face the road. “So, the problem with those big chain bookstores is the service, I find,” he says, and I’m already rolling my eyes.

When we meet up with Michelle and Alex, Alex has her hair chopped off and she’s wearing a sweater vest over top of a button-up shirt. Her angular face looks much more boyish framed by the hair, and my reaction to her facial tattoos is more visceral than I’m comfortable with. She takes Richard’s hand and leads him off into the backroom of Michelle’s apartment. Michelle brings out some tea for us to drink, and we sit down.

“I talked her out of binding herself with ACE bandages,” Michelle says, nodding her head the way Richard and Alex have gone. “She’s decided to start self-identifying as a gay man, and she wanted to bind her breasts for when Richard got here.” I’m smiling, and Michelle shakes her head. “I told her I would introduce her to some real drag kings I know, and they’d show her how to do it properly. I don’t want her to hurt herself.”

The way Michelle seems to have taken Alex under her wing verifies my initial feelings about her, I think. She is smart and queer and awesome. If I weren’t gay, or she weren’t a woman, I might consider attempting to ensnare her in the ugly web of a monogamous relationship. Instead I’ll just be glad she’s a part of our “superhero team.”

“We couldn’t find any good books,” I say, “but Richard’s brother is willing to illustrate one for us. Richard will pay the printing costs, and this way we’ll have complete control over the end result. We won’t have to be sneaking watered-down garbage onto the shelves. I think that’d defeat the whole purpose.”

“We’ll write it ourselves?” Michelle grins. “That sounds awesome.” She pulls a bag out from under the coffee table and shows me the masks, Bert and Ernie and Velma and Wonder Woman. They’re cheesy and plastic and perfect. I feel the way bank robbers must feel before they go out on that last job that ends up getting them all killed. That is to say, optimistic.

When Alex and Richard come back, they’re holding hands and Richard is avoiding my eyes. Alex tells me they’re boyfriends. “But it’s not monogamous or anything like that,” she says. “Neither of us is that naive.” It’s cute that she makes a little announcement of it. Sorry, not “she” — “he.” Now I’m going to get my pronouns confused. It’s cute that Alex makes a little announcement of it. I like him.

“That’s awesome,” I say, and Richard looks to see if I’m being sarcastic. I meet his eyes and smile. “We ought to get that book written tonight,” I say. “We can drop off the text to your brother in the morning. We don’t need this to be a work of art, or subtle. We want something fun, that kids will really enjoy, and something politically effective.”

“The gay grandpa idea’s a good one,” Richard says, and he and Alex sit down. Alex crosses his legs, like a gay man might, and I grin. “My grandpa’s gay, maybe I should be too!” he explains to Michelle and Alex.

Michelle nods, but leans forward.

“That’s all right, but it’s so detached. All those children’s books are detached like that. We want something in the first person, you know? About a boy who likes to play with dolls, and who wants to be Christina Aguilera when he grows up, not Clint Eastwood.”

Richard looks pained.

“I wanted to be Clint Eastwood when I grew up,” he says.

“You are,” I assure him, and Alex laughs. He snakes his arm around behind Richard’s back. “That’s good though,” I say to Michelle. “Something smart too, not condescending. Something like, ‘Last year, when I turned eight, my mommy bought me a big bag of army men. She knows that I don’t condone the patriotic ideal of might makes right, but more importantly she knows how much those single-tone uniforms bother me. I made it perfectly clear that all I wanted for my birthday was a day at the spa.’ Or something fun like that?”

“‘Daddy found my doll collection and threw it out with the trash,’” Michelle says. “‘And he got so mad when I asked him whether his anger at my eschewal of traditional gender roles was based on his repressed homosexual urges.’”

Richard is grinning, and he picks up the pen off the table.

“That’s good,” he says, writing it down.

“Are we writing this about being gay, or being transgendered?” Alex asks, and Michelle shakes her head. Alex leans back in his chair, and Richard takes his hand. He, he, he. I have to get the pronoun down properly, so that I use it without thinking. Alex’ll appreciate that, I think.

“Queer,” Michelle says. “We can have an older sister who comes out of the closet maybe. And she wants to be an astronaut and get married to her lady friend on the moon! And all the neighbourhood kids decide they want to be gay astronauts too.”

Richard writes furiously, and already I can picture the drawings, simple and elegant and fun. I wish I’d had a book like this. This is what publishers should be putting out. Fun and silly and positive.

Fuck Dr. Seuss.

Chapter 4

Maybe Alex really is a boy. I’ve never seen him naked. Those could be unbound breast forms under his shirt. I watch him run his fingers up the back of Richard’s neck.

“What about a boy with a pet dinosaur,” Alex says. We’re still talking about the book. “The dinosaur could be gay, and they could ride around town cruising for hot dinosaur loving, and the other dinosaurs would be all like, ‘Can I pet your little boy? He’s so precious. Does he bite? I had a little boy just like this when I was a kid.’ And then the dinosaur gets the other dinosaur’s number.” He grins. “Little kids are a total dino magnet,” he says, and even in the near dark of the room I can see that Richard is smiling at him.

Michelle and I are sitting on the couch, and Richard and Alex are on the floor in front of us. I like Michelle’s apartment. It’s cozy without being too cute. Nothing is too clean, or too careful, but nothing’s disgusting either. It’s comfortable.

“I don’t know,” Michelle says. “‘Can I pet your little kid?’ That sounds kind of sketchy. We don’t have to be politically correct, but we should probably avoid implications of pedophilia. We want a positive message. What was wrong with the girl who wants to be a gay astronaut? We could have a book where she goes to class, and everyone has to say what they want to be. Her classmates are all saying things like, ‘I want to be a fireman,’ or ‘I want to be the first female president,’ or ‘I want to be a soldier,’ and then she goes up and says, ‘I want to be the first lesbian astronaut to get married in space!’”

Richard’s cell rings, and he hands it to me. It’s Chris.

“Hey,” I say, and motion for them to keep talking. I lock myself in the bathroom with the kitty litter and a shelf full of pills. “Did you send the TV back already?” I lift up one of the pill bottles. I have no idea what the drug is. Something to do with girl parts probably. “It was a nice TV,” I say, and then I duck my head to the sink and take a sip of water. “I hope you didn’t throw it away.”

“I talked him into keeping it,” Chris says. “He wanted to call the cops on you. Is that water running?”

I wipe my mouth and shake my head, even though he can’t see me.

“Where’s the boyfriend now?” I say. I pick another bottle off the shelf. Oxycocet. Painkillers. I think about pocketing a few, but decide against it. Anyway, if I ask, she’ll probably share.

“At work.” There’s a pause. “Are you busy? Do you want to come over?”

I can hear Richard and Alex and Michelle all laughing in the living room, and when I open the door to peek, Richard is making ridiculous, grandiose arm gestures. I don’t even need to think about the decision.

“I’m busy,” I say. “And anyway, I’d rather not have to sneak out before the boyfriend comes home.”

“What, you want to stay and cuddle all night?” His voice is sharp. “You’ve known all along what the situation was. I don’t need you pulling shit like you pulled today. If I want to tell him I’m fucking someone else, I’ll tell him. It’s not your place.”

And after I hang up, I feel stupid. It used to be exciting to be the other man. Now I just feel like I’m taking a passive role in the reinforcement of traditional monogamous beliefs. What would monogamy be if there wasn’t something to compare it to?

I call Mrs. Hubert, and this time she answers.

“Monogamy is defined by what it is not, just as much as by what it is,” I say. “We couldn’t have monogamy without infidelity, the same as we couldn’t have sad without happy, or down without up. By fucking around in secret, within a relationship defined as monogamous, aren’t I just playing the devil in monogamy’s Sunday-school pageant?”

I’m saying all this to a dial tone.

Back at the group, they’re still talking about ideas for the book. Now Richard’s got one.

“We could have a kid who just changes gender at random,” Richard says. “He wakes up and all of a sudden he’s a girl. He doesn’t feel any different on the inside, but on the outside he’s all pigtails and rosy cheeks. His mom and dad insist that he’s always been a girl. His toys are all replaced by dolls and tea sets.”

I sit down next to Michelle again.

What if I woke up tomorrow and I was a girl? How would that be any different? I mean, I’d have to throw out all of my clothes, for one, and someday next month there would be a terrifying trip to the bathroom. I wonder if those trips get less terrifying. Would it be worth it, having to have breasts, so that I could be fucked by two men at once? Richard is looking at me, and I smile.

“And maybe he doesn’t understand what it means to be a girl,” I say. “That’s a good idea. He has to pee sitting down. He’s not allowed in the boys’ washroom anymore. People give him funny looks when he buys baseball cards.” Do people still buy baseball cards? I’m trying not to think about Chris’s body.

“And all his clothes are gone,” Alex says, getting into it. “He has to dress up like an idiot.”

I can already picture the cartoons that go along with the story — a little girl dressed in girl clothes, looking sour. Getting more and more frustrated as the book progresses.

Richard nods. “But then he starts having fun. He likes how nice his friends smell now. His new girl friends. He realizes that he likes dolls just as much as action figures. He even starts to get a crush on a boy in his class. The boy gives him a valentine, and he blushes. And just when he gets used to being a girl,” Richard says, “just when he’s accepted his fate, he wakes up and he’s a boy again.”

“Only now he doesn’t feel like a boy anymore either!” Alex says. “His friends seem dirty and rude, and he feels weird wearing a pair of pants instead of a skirt. He gives a love note to that boy from school. His mom comes in and finds him trying on her heels.”

Richard, who’s writing this all down, smiles. “Johnny’s a girl, sometimes,” he says, and the decision is already made. Johnny’s a Girl, Sometimes.

I lean back and look over at Michelle. I feel like we’re a band, recording an album so personal we’ll eventually refuse to play any of the songs in concert.

“We should celebrate,” I say.

She nods.

“We should get fucking drunk,” I say. “And break into something.” And we do.

Michelle is standing four feet away, keeping watch at the corner of the school. Alex and Richard are in the car, making out. I’m trying to hold a bottle of whisky with the same hand I’ve got the pick in. It’s complicated, but everything’s complicated these days.

“Picking locks is a lot like being queer,” I say. I’m on my knees in front of the door. “Taking the world as you see it, and not how you’re told to see it. There’s no real difference between turning the knob and picking the lock.” I don’t intend “turning the knob” as a euphemism for being gay, but I kind of like the way it sounds. “Both are a series of mechanical actions by which you gain access to the room beyond.”

Michelle runs her hand through her hair, which is the signal that someone is coming, and I slide the tools out of the lock and into my pocket. She grabs me hard by the elbow and kisses me. We’re making out as the man comes around the corner, and I break off to smile and nod and offer him a drink from the whisky. “Sorry,” he says. He doesn’t give us a second look. There’s nothing to see. We’re just a couple of kids out for an evening of healthy heterosexual living.

“I love that,” I say when he’s gone. The whisky burns going down, and I feel like it’s going to eat right through my body and splash to the ground beneath me. “We’re using his preconceived notions of what’s sexually normal to create a sense of the everyday about our actions!”

Michelle laughs at me.

“We were pretending to make out,” she says.

I shove the whisky into her hands and bend down again and select a different pick. Women. After a minute, the lock turns, and I pull the door open and usher Michelle into the school. It takes less than a second before we’re standing in the dark. This is our trial run. It’ll be quicker when we’re sober.

“Listen,” I say, as we sneak along the row of lockers to the first classroom. “The education of children is too important to leave in the hands of their parents. Kids aren’t old enough to decide for themselves what to read, but should the parents really get to choose for them? I mean, children are the future, and the more of them who grow up free of bigotry, the more of them who are exposed to queer concepts and ideas, the better.”

“You sound like a radio commercial,” Michelle says. The bottle’s empty, and she winds up her arm and throws it down the hallway. It is like an alarm going off, it’s so loud. She grabs me and pulls me into the nearest room. “This is it,” she says.

The classroom is small, and the bookshelf is in the very back. It’s pitiful. There are hardly any books at all. “What the hell is wrong with people?” I say. “These kids should have a whole shelf full of books for our subversive addition to get lost in.” I step back and look around. Michelle is leaning forward to read something, and I move closer.

On the wall above the bookshelf, the teacher has hung up all these drawings that the kids made of their families. There are a couple single-mother families, but everything else is mom, dad, little brother, dog, cat, budgie bird. Michelle grabs some crayons from a bucket and starts to draw on one of the pictures.

She draws a stick man in the same style as the mom and the dad, with stick arms and a receding hairline. She gives him a little bottle of something red to hold. Above the stick man she writes “Dad’s boyfriend” and by the bottle she writes “Rev” and hands me a crayon. “Get to it,” she says.

I find a picture of a single mom and a little girl, and I draw another little girl beside the first one, and I write “My favourite kissing cousin Judy.” I give Judy long blond hair and a nice little skirt. With a brown crayon from the jar, I make it so she’s holding a football. I step back to admire it, but it feels weird. Some kid drew this picture and was proud of it.

Michelle is drawing a room full of men standing around a nuclear family.

“I don’t know about this,” I say to her.

“You what?”

“I don’t know about this. I mean, this kid’s family.” I point at one of the pictures. “His family probably is really like this — a dog and a mom and a dad.”

“If it wasn’t, do you think he’d have the guts to draw two dads?” Michelle says. “Everyone else is drawing mom and pop and little Skippy, and you think some six-year-old is going to go out on a limb and draw his dad’s fuck buddy?” She tosses the crayon down and grins. “You’re so full of shit, I can’t believe it.”

“Well, maybe we should draw on every single one of them.” I say. “So nobody gets singled out.”

“You need to have all these crazy justifications for doing what you want,” Michelle says. “You really think there are moral grounds for breaking into a school in the middle of the night. It’s hilarious. You know damn well that you’re doing this for the same reasons I am. You’re doing this because it’s awesome.”

I almost say something, make some argument against her, but she’s right. I’m doing this children’s book thing because I want to, because it seems right in my head. Whether that’s because of the moral arguments I’ve been attributing to it, or because I’m angry and juvenile, I couldn’t say. And to be honest, I don’t really care. Right now I’m having a good time. I pick up the crayon she’s thrown down.

“Let’s draw one for the teacher,” I say. “And let’s make the teacher straight, so she’s the odd man out.” But we can’t figure out if the teacher is a boy or a girl. There’s nothing on the desk, no name or anything, and it’s dark and we’re drunk. “Let’s turn all the desks around so they face the other way,” I say, but it’s too late. She’s already at the door.

“Who do you think is topping?” Michelle asks, as we slip back out the door we came in. I remember that Richard and Alex are waiting in the car, just as drunk as we are, but maybe more naked.

“Alex,” I answer. “Richard’s a total woman.”

When we get back to the car, Richard and Alex are asleep in the back seat, their pants around their ankles. Richard is handcuffed to the door, and Alex has his arms around him. It’s sort of sweet, and so Michelle and I take a walk instead of waking them up.

The next morning I wake up to Alex climbing into bed with me, pressing against my leg. There’s something hard in her pants, and I scramble out of the bed, half of me awake and half of me still in some dream about insects covering the earth. I’m not sure that she’s real.

“Hey,” she whispers, and she sits back on the bed. I try my best to smile. “I just thought maybe you’d want to . . .” she says, but I shake my head.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her.

“You still see me as a girl,” she says, and there’s as much accusation in her voice as self-pity. But what can I say to that? I want to tell her, no, I see her as a boy. I want to say that just because she’s a boy doesn’t mean I’ll want to sleep with her. I don’t fuck every man I meet. If I told her that, it would turn the situation around. She’d be the guilty one, for assuming, for implying. But that’s not why I’m still standing.

“You are a girl,” I say. “You’ve got tits and a vagina, and whatever that is in your pants, it’s not going to come on me, or in me. It’s fake.” Her face falls a little, but then it goes hard. She stares at me in silence. “I know that gender is a construction,” I say, and I tap my temple. “Right here I know that you’re as much a boy as you are a woman, but knowing something is different from knowing something.”

“You know what I think?” she says. “I think that if it wasn’t born with a cock, you won’t fuck it.” And I want to argue that I’ve fucked post-op trannies, but the fact is that they were all MTF and not the other way around. “You talk big about gender being a construction, but you aren’t willing to apply that to sexuality. You don’t believe a word of the shit you say.”

“Gender is a construction,” I say, and she pulls at the front of her pants. They come open and the dildo pops out.

“Make me believe it,” she says, and what the hell. I climb on the bed with her. I pull my own pants open, and she takes my cock in her hands. His hands. I mean, he takes my cock in his hands and squeezes. It hardens and I press against his naked stomach. I moan and hope that Richard doesn’t hear us. Would he be jealous? I don’t know anymore.

Alex lies on his back, and I lower myself to his cock, hard and dark. My hand snakes up his chest and I take his breast in my hand, pulling at the nipple. I start to gnaw on the cock with my teeth, harder and harder, my free hand going between my own legs.

And then Richard is behind me, pressing a finger cold with lube into me and saying to Alex, “I didn’t know where you were.”

Alex moans softly, and Richard enters.

Chapter 5

Michelle parks Richard’s car in the mall parking garage. Consumerism is a devastating creature, don’t get me wrong. It crawls across the world again and again, destroying the older, weaker versions of itself. Walmarts eat mom-and-pop shops, malls eat the Walmarts, and super-malls (like this one here) eat all the little malls, chewing them like gum, and stretching them across six floors and eight blocks of conformity. It’s disgusting. But if you’re in the mood to cause trouble, there’s nowhere better.

“I don’t want you to make any jokes about Sheryl’s clothes,” Michelle says as the two of us walk to the elevator. “She’s on this kick about beauty and fashion, and so she’s been wearing suit jackets over these awful yellow sundresses. You probably won’t offend her, but she’ll think you’re an idiot.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I say. We go inside where Sheryl and her friend Gilyan are waiting for us.

We find a woman walking with a baby carriage, and we rush over to her, all smiles. “Oh my goodness!” Sheryl squeals as we look down into the carriage at the pink blankets and wispy hair. “Oh my goodness, what a cute little boy!” and the woman opens her mouth to say something, but Gilyan cuts her off, reaching in to gently tickle the baby’s pink bootie.

“What a handsome little boy! What’s your name? What’s your name?” Gilyan does the baby-talk voice so well that I want to laugh.

The mother opens her mouth again, and this time it’s Michelle who cuts her off.

“He looks like an Alfred,” she says. “A little Alfie. Are you going to grow up to be an Alfie?” she says. “You’ll get all the girls, won’t you? Won’t you? I bet you will!”

I lean over to take a look. The baby smiles up at me, and I can’t help smiling myself.

“He’s handsome,” I agree, and I turn to the mother. “But why do you have him dressed up in pink, like a little faggot? That shit can seriously warp a child.”

“It’s a girl,” the mother says. She turns to Michelle. “Her name is Meg.”

And I roll my eyes.

“You can’t raise a little boy like he’s a girl,” I say. “He’ll grow up all confused. You have to instill in him right from birth that boys and girls are inherently different. If you don’t teach him that, he may never figure it out, and then what would happen?”

“Madness! Utter madness!” Michelle says. “It would be chaos! Boys and girls would have similar life goals! They’d treat each other as individuals instead of as potential mates or acquisitions! Could you imagine?”

“How would they know what to wear to prom?” Gilyan says. “How would they know who to fall in love with? They might be guided by their interests instead of societal norms!”

“She’s right,” I say, putting my hand on the woman’s shoulder. “You need to take this boy upstairs to Baby Gap and get him into some overalls before he starts fagging up the whole world.”

She stands there silently, looking at each of us in turn, and then she gives a sort of half smile like you give to homeless people who want to tell you about their chicken-and-cat-sandwich recipe. She walks away.

“Goodbye, Alfie!” calls Gilyan, and she turns away before she lets herself laugh.

On the second floor, I buy a Coke from McDonald’s and drink it. Michelle and the others are sitting near me, pretending we don’t know each other. They’re laughing and talking, and I wonder what they’re talking about. Sheryl really does dress like an idiot. She’s great. They all are.

I walk up to the front and slam the Coke down on the counter beside the cash register. “The manager,” I say to the twelve-year-old girl they’ve got working. I think she’s twelve anyway; I have no idea how quickly girls develop these days. I saw something on TV about it, I think. All these hormones in their milk at breakfast, in their cereal, fucking them up. Maybe little girls are born with tits now?

She’s still young enough to be a ballerina, isn’t she? I’ve missed so many opportunities. I’ll never be a ballerina. It’s too late. I missed the boat. I made the wrong choices. I couldn’t even be a high school dropout if I wanted to. Still, I’ll get to be a cantankerous old man one day, with a walking stick to shake at all the little five-year-old girls with their tits hanging out.

The manager is skinny and balding. “Is there something I can help you with?” he says, and I give him a long stare, and then look down at the Coke. He follows my gaze. “There’s something wrong with your beverage, sir?” he asks.

“You tell me,” I say, and push the Coke toward him. “I bought this Coke five minutes ago. I thought I would stop off on my way home and buy a book at the mall, maybe have a Coke. It’s my girlfriend’s birthday though, so I didn’t want to take too long. I planned on slipping her the dick, if you know what I mean.”

“What seems to be the problem, sir?” he says, and it’s like he’s reading lines out of a fast-food-manager script. Everyone talks the way they’re supposed to these days. It’s like we’ve become the voices for our institutions. He’s the fast-food manager, and I’m the disgruntled customer. In a few seconds I’ll go back to being the frustrated genderqueer faggot and he’ll be the frustrated manager. Either way, you could listen to us talk for five minutes and figure out who we are.

“This Coke made me gay,” I say. I hold out my hand for him to examine it. “Look at that. I’ve never had a manicure in my life, but now my nails are neat and tidy. Neat and tidy! I work in a factory, man. I can’t have the guys at work thinking I’ve been filing my nails instead of biting them down.”

“The pop made you gay?” he says, and now he’s the sarcastic fast-food worker, embittered. The big-titty twelve-year-old is covering her mouth, pretending not to laugh. He gives her a dirty look.

“What am I going to do now?” I say. “I have a girlfriend at home, waiting for my Johnson Special, and all I’m thinking about is how to do her hair!” The manager is looking behind me now. “Hey! I said my girlfriend loves cock! You look at me when I’m talking to you about my lost heterosexuality.”

“I’m sorry, there are customers waiting,” he says. “If you have a valid complaint, you can call the head office.”

I open my mouth to say something, but Michelle interrupts me.

“I don’t mean to interrupt,” she says.

The manager is smiling again, and he shakes his head.

“Not at all, ma’am,” he says. “Is there something I can help you with?”

“I sure hope so,” she tells him. “I think this Coke turned my friends gay.” She points over her shoulder, where Gilyan and Sheryl are making out in their chairs. Customers all over the store are staring. “I don’t mind or anything,” Michelle says. “I mean, six in ten people are queer these days or something. Whatever. It’s just that we have to get to a swim meet, and I’m worried they’ll be too busy thinking about vaginas to focus on their warm-up exercises. Is there anything you can do? Have you got any Pepsi maybe?”

“You probably have to call the head office,” I tell her, and Michelle nods, thoughtfully.

“Oh, okay,” she says, and smiles at the manager. “The food was really good.”

After that we’re just wandering around the mall, trying to think up things to do to fuck with people. Nobody can think of anything else, and everyone just wants to get in the car and go find some beer.

“Okay, we’ll go,” Michelle says, but there’s disappointment in her voice, like she’s looking for one last hurrah before we head off. One last complete mindfuck to leave people with their jaws hanging, thinking about things they never thought about before. Unlikely.

I’m having a blast though, and I come up with one last idea. I find a girl that’s skinny and blond and Paris Hilton–fake. She’s got a dainty little bag slung over her shoulder, and her skin sort of glitters. She’s standing beside this boy with cheekbones I want to run my fingers over. He’s fucking hot is what he is, and she’s got her arm in his.

“Wait here,” I tell Sheryl and the others, and I walk over to them. As I approach, I get that feeling in the pit of my stomach that I get when I see a straight guy with some ditsy-looking pin-up girl. I want to push her down stairs. I want her to step out in front of a car and leave a makeup smear for blocks. This is how I react to the beauty myth, I guess.

Normally I push those feelings down, or turn them into sarcasm. Not today. Today I punch the girl in the gut. She bends a bit and steps back, and I wonder if I should say something here. Make some comment about reinforcing an unrealistic standard of beauty, or about perpetuating the cycle. I want to kick her when she’s down, but instead I turn and smile at the boy. “Do you come here often?” I say.

His fist connects, and then Michelle is there, her knee in his groin, and she’s pulling me in the direction of the elevators and laughing. “You are fucked in the head,” she says, and I run along beside her, looking back. The girl is climbing to her feet, looking around. She doesn’t help the boy up.

I have no idea where Sheryl or Gilyan are. In the elevator Michelle just looks at me, this half smile on her face. “I wanted to be you there,” she says. “Fuck.” There are no security guards waiting for us, and we get in the car and we’re gone. We pick up Sheryl and Gilyan on the street outside. They’ve come out the front doors of the mall.

We drive with no destination in mind. I think about the look of shock on the blond girl’s face when I punched her. She’s as much a victim of the beauty myth as anyone else, and I’m not sure whether what I did is justifiable or not. She was born that way, skinny and blond and tall.

Michelle takes a corner fast, and I press my hand against the door. I still feel weird about fucking Alex and Richard at the same time. Fucking Alex’s cock didn’t feel like sex. Or it did, but it felt like Richard was fucking me with a dildo. It’s just that the dildo could talk.

We stop at an adult video store, pile out of the car. Gilyan asks the guy behind the counter, “Do you have anything with Asians in it?” The guy nods and leads us all upstairs. There’s a whole wall of boxes. Before the clerk can leave, Gilyan says, “Is any of this gay porn?” and he sighs and leads us to the back.

“Here you are,” he says. “Gay Asian porn.”

“Thank you so much,” Gilyan says. She pretends to look at a box. “Oh, I can’t tell from looking, are any of these Asians born in Canada, but living in Europe?”

“What?” he says, and Gilyan smiles.

“I have a thing for gay porn starring Asians who were born in Canada, but who were living in Europe at the time of filming. It’s kind of my fetish, I guess. I don’t like blond Asian guys though. A lot of the Canadian-born Eurofag Asian porn you get has blonds in it. It just looks so fake.” She turns to me. “It’s really gross, don’t you think?” she says.

“Disgusting,” I say. “Unconscionable.”

Our next stop is the liquor store, and then to Michelle’s. The television is showing footage of a “family values” rally that went on today, and there’s a dark-haired man standing at a podium with his finger pointing out at the crowd.

“You care about your children,” he says. “I know you do. That’s why you’re here.” There’s a little boy standing beside him, holding on to the fabric of the man’s black pants. He reaches down and picks the boy up. “That’s why I’m here too,” he says.

“Can you imagine what it must be like to be that kid?” Michelle says, taking a sip of her beer. “Every day you wake up and pad downstairs in your dinosaur slippers to a breakfast across the table from that.” She points her beer at the TV just as it cuts to a close-up of the man’s face. The caption says “Dr. Verge.” He’s still pointing.

“Political correctness and the truth are two different things,” he says. “Maybe it isn’t politically correct to say that homosexuality is a disease, that it needs to be cured or destroyed. It might not be polite to say so, but I know that it’s the truth, and I have a right to defend my child’s future.” The camera pans to the boy’s unsmiling face.

“The poor thing,” Sheryl says.

Dr. Verge’s face fills the screen again.

“My child deserves the chance to grow up in a country that still believes in the word of the Lord. A country where marriage is a symbol of the love between a man and a woman, not a joke or an excuse for some novelty cake with two plastic tuxedoed deviants on top. My son deserves to grow up in a world where he can go to school without having to worry that one of his teachers is having lustful thoughts about him.”

There’s a lot of applause, and Gilyan groans. “He’s not making a very coherent argument, is he?” she says. “But he’s touching all the right nerves.” She lifts the remote and switches the channel.

The world would be better if people took things into their own hands. A world where people acted on their beliefs. A world where, if they saw someone like Dr. Verge raising their child to be hateful, they would simply take that child from him and raise the child right. My eyes are heavy from the alcohol, and my mind is flitting all over the place.

Alex was angry that I’d chewed up her cock. His cock. I didn’t know what to tell him. I said, “Sometimes I get carried away with sex toys,” and he threw the chewed-up cock down on the ground and said, “It isn’t a sex toy. It’s my fucking cock.”

Richard hadn’t said anything at all.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean that.” But it was too late. Later he made it clear that he didn’t want me to come with them to see Richard’s brother. So Michelle and I had driven them across town and dropped them off before we hit the mall. What time is it now? I lift my head, but can’t see a clock.

There’s a cartoon or something on television. Death to the cartoon heterosexual paradigm! Richard and Alex should be back soon. I’m worried that Richard’s getting too attached to him. I open my eyes again and watch a cartoon man on the television. He doesn’t do anything but sit and talk. That’s the problem with cartoons these days. It’s all just talking heads. None of them do anything anymore.

I miss the violence, I guess, and that feeling that you’re watching a whole new world, where the rules change constantly. These cartoons could be filmed with real actors. There’s no surrealism, no magic. There was one moment, the moment when Richard’s cock entered me and Alex’s cock pressed against my throat, where I really believed that it was two men. Just that one moment.

And then it was gone, and it was a girl with a fake dick again.

Chapter 6

I pull down a Polaroid camera and cut into its packaging with my knife. I tear the camera free and toss the garbage on the floor. From the shelf I grab three packages of Polaroid film and one package of regular film. Richard’s waiting in the car, but I take my time with this, not wanting to look suspicious. I shove the Polaroid film down the front of my pants and walk to the front counter.

“Excuse me,” I say to the girl who’s working. I show her the 35mm film and lift up the camera for her to examine. “Is this the right film for my camera? I’ve never had to buy film for it before. There was some other stuff over there that said Polaroid on it, but it was pretty expensive.”

She makes a show of looking at the film, but then shakes her head. “That won’t work,” she says, and I nod. “You need the film that says Polaroid on the package.”

The Polaroid film is mostly stuck in my underwear, but one of the packages has got partway down my jeans already. I’m still smiling though.

“Okay,” I tell her. “Is it okay if I leave that film with you then? I’m not even sure where I got it.” She nods, and I’m gone, stopping just outside the door of the drugstore to shake the film out of my pant leg. I pick it up off the ground and jog to Richard’s car.

“What do you need a camera for?” he says. “I thought you were buying condoms.” I put the camera on his lap and I don’t answer, tearing at the film package with my teeth. Richard pulls the car out onto the road, and we’re moving. The camera is simple to load, and I turn on the flash and unbutton the front of my pants. I’m rock-hard.

Flash.

I take his right hand in mine and guide it to my cock. Flash. He’s squeezing and pulling at me now, and I set the camera on the dash and reach over to pull at the zipper of his pants as he drives. His fingers leave my cock and he picks up the camera as I lower my mouth to him. Flash. People are always saying that cellphones cause accidents.

We finish one of the rolls on the drive to the school, and the single best picture is this one where I’m in the seat beside him, the Velma mask on my face and my knees up at my shoulders as I finger my asshole, three fingers on each hand. It’s so lewd, and the mask is smiling so cheerfully. It belongs on the cover of a national newsmagazine.

I’m Velma now, and Richard is Wonder Woman. At some other school across town, Michelle and Alex are Bert and Ernie. Alex was pissed off because she already identified as a man, and so she didn’t get to wear a gender-inappropriate mask. We park three blocks away.

Richard pops the trunk and lifts out the box. A box of our books, fresh from a print shop where Richard’s fucking someone; the guy snuck him in after hours. Michelle and Alex have a box too. We get into the school, and Richard starts humming the national anthem.

“God,” he whispers. “It’s been so long since I was in a school like this. Lockers and tiled floors and coat hangers in the hall.” We find a classroom on the first floor. Richard holds the book up so you can see the cover. The little boy in a dress: “Johnny’s a girl, sometimes.” Flash. He slides it onto the shelf with the other books. Flash.

Just outside the door we stop in front of the lockers. They’re padlocked, but there’s a vent just big enough to shove a book into. I push one into the locker nearest me so that it’s sticking halfway out, and turn my mask toward the camera. Flash. I give the book a little tap. It falls with a metallic thud to the bottom of the locker.

In classroom number two we put a couple books onto the shelves, and then Richard lifts a thick book off a table and opens it. “Give me one of the books,” he says, and he lays it inside, closes the book, and puts it back.

In the hallway Richard takes my hand and leads me through a door. Inside, there’s a row of sinks lit by light from the street outside, and sound echoes. The girls’ washroom. “I’m really glad you decided to join the squad,” Richard says, putting the box of books down and pulling his mask off. “Most of the other girls are way too uptight about their cheers, you know. You seem like you’re just in it for the fun.”

He’s dead serious, lifting himself up to sit on the edge of the sink, his legs dangling girlishly.

“Do you have a smoke?” I say. “I’ve been dying for one ever since third period.”

“No,” Richard says. “Can you believe that I had my locker searched again today? Twice in one week. It’s not legal. My dad says it’s an invasion of privacy.”

I move closer to the sink where he’s sitting, and I run my finger up the leg of his jeans.

“Do you use that shit Nair?” I say. “I can never get my legs that smooth.”

He shakes his head.

“That’s just from shaving? Wow. The only part of my body I can ever get that smooth is my pussy.”

“You shave your pussy?” Richard’s voice goes high-pitched with a teenager’s disbelief, and I almost laugh. I can see his bulge in the front of his jeans, but he’s looking at me so intently that I know he wants me to keep up the act.

“David likes it,” I say. “I think it’s kind of gross, you know. Little girls have no pubes. Why does he want me to look like a little girl? He says he just likes the way it feels.”

“I’ll bet,” Richard says, reaching out to take my hair in his fingers. “Can I play with your hair?”

I turn my back and lean against the sink, between his legs.

“I found some porn on his computer though,” I say. “Of, like, girls who look our age, kissing each other. I guess it’s not illegal if he’s sixteen too though. That’s what he said. I didn’t ask him about the ones that had women crying and stuff. Mostly it was just girls kissing each other. Hundreds of pictures.”

“You looked at them all?” Richard’s hands are playing with my hair, but every once in a while they run down to touch my earlobe. I can feel his cock pressing against my back. “Did you . . . ?” His fingers run down the side of my neck and down my shoulders, avoiding my breasts and moving to my cock.

“What if someone from the team comes in?” I say, but already I’m turning and running my hands up under Richard’s shirt, childishly pawing for breasts that aren’t there.

“Let them,” Richard whispers, and he leans close to kiss me, and a voice out in the hallway says, “I’m just going to do one more sweep.” And there’s the sound of a walkie-talkie hissing static. Richard’s eyes have gone wide. There’s another burst of static, and a voice says something I can’t hear.

I undo the front of Richard’s pants, and he’s frozen with fear. I run my tongue up the length of him, and the man outside the bathroom coughs and says, “What was that again?” as I take Richard as deep as I can. I don’t know if it’s the fear or the role-playing, but he comes.

I’m so startled that I almost cough out loud, and I pull off of him while he’s still flexing. Come lands on my face, and then on the floor between us as I move backwards. He’s still sitting on the sink, and his legs are spread out for balance, with his cock glistening in the streetlight. My cheerleader.

We get back to the car, and we’re laughing about it. “We weren’t really in any danger,” I say, throwing the Polaroids on the back seat with the camera. “He would have walked in and what? Arrested two hot high school lesbians in the middle of fucking? It would have been a dream come true.”

“Dear Penthouse,” Richard says as we begin to move. “I never believed that something like this could ever happen to me, but I was working security at the elementary school the other night, and I walked in on this hot lesbian cheerleader eating out her friend’s shaved pussy.” On the right we’re coming up on the school, and I can see the little security car, with two men standing beside it. They don’t look up as we cruise past. “I don’t know why they were in an elementary school at night,” Richard says, “but I’ve never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth.”

Alex and Michelle are waiting at Michelle’s house, holding hands. The place stinks of lesbian sex, and I hope that Richard doesn’t want to stay here tonight. The smell seems to be bothering him too, or the fact that they’re holding hands.

“How’d it go?” Richard says to Alex, and she shrugs, looking sidelong at Michelle. The two of them laugh, and Richard turns to me. “We were almost caught,” he says. “There was a security guard on duty.”

“I hope there wasn’t a security guard on duty at our school,” Alex says, and Michelle rolls her eyes.

Richard’s trying to smile, but not doing a very good job of it.

“Were you a guy or a girl when you fucked her?” he says, and Alex shrugs again. I wonder if I shrugged that much when I was seventeen. Did everyone want to throttle me constantly?

“Not really any of your business, is it?” Alex says.

“We’ll give you a call in the morning,” I say to Michelle, and she nods and walks us to the door. We leave the box of remaining books by the shoes.

In the car Richard is quiet. He doesn’t say anything until we’re standing in his living room. “You can take the bed if you want,” he says. “I feel like sleeping on the couch.”

His bed is comfortable, and I don’t mind sleeping alone. I take his cellphone with me and, sitting on the edge of his bed, I punch in Mrs. Hubert’s number. It’s almost three in the morning. She answers on the first ring.

“Good morning, Mrs. Hubert,” I say. “I was just wondering if I could ask you a couple more questions for my survey.”

“Okay,” she says, sounding groggy. “Questions?”

“I punched a girl in the stomach,” I say. “At the mall. I did it because I was angry, and I don’t know if it was right or not. I don’t think it was.” I pause, and I can hear her husband saying, “Who is it?” in the background. “I don’t mean because she was a girl,” I say. “I’m not sure exactly what the differences are between a man and a woman. I wish I knew more. I know that I’m much bigger than her, and that her boyfriend was much bigger than me.”

“Did he hit you?” she says, and I nod.

“Yeah, but I knew that he would. I just couldn’t control myself. For that couple of minutes she symbolized everything that is wrong with how we perceive beauty as a society; she was the store-bought ideal that drives girls to bulimia and anorexia. She was the skinny thinspiration that helps thirteen-year-olds put off eating for just one more day, and so I walked over and punched her.”

“Why?” Mrs. Hubert says, and she doesn’t sound angry or irritated; she just sounds confused. “Do you think that solved anything?”

“I don’t know what to do,” I say. “I say that society’s beauty standards are killing young girls, but I don’t have a solution to that. Any beauty ideal we create will be exclusive, almost by definition. And the concept of beauty itself wouldn’t withstand an all-encompassing tact. If everyone is beautiful, then nothing is. It’s so frustrating. I punched her hard, and she went down, but I have no idea who she is. I can’t find out anything about her, can I? She was just some stranger in the mall. What if she’s done nothing to deserve it? What if she’s the nicest girl you’ve ever met?”

“You can’t do anything to fix it,” Mrs. Hubert says. “All you can really do is learn from your mistakes. Anger doesn’t solve anything,” she says.

“I don’t know if I believe that,” I say. “We can’t just push our anger down.”

“Are you the boy who keeps calling here?” she says, and I hang up. It hasn’t helped.

Richard’s standing in the doorway when I turn around, and it’s clear from his face that he’s heard the whole thing. He looks like he wants to say something. I smile as best I can and say, “The best way to approach someone with a difficult new concept is to couch that concept in a discourse pattern that they’re already familiar with. In this case I chose the motherly paradigm. In order to open her mind to issues of personal responsibility and gender-role confusion, I approached her as a troubled son might, looking for answers from his mother.”

He’s still making the face, and I cut him off before he speaks. “I won’t use your phone for it anymore,” I say. “That was irresponsible of me. Goodnight.” I turn off the light and roll over to face the window. The moon is out, and for a while I can hear him breathing behind me. I don’t notice when it stops, but I am suddenly aware that it’s much quieter, and when I turn to look again he’s gone.

I realize I’m dreaming when the elephant turns her head to look at me, and she lifts her trunk and words flow out like music. No flyers please, no flyers please, no flyers please. And suddenly I’m floating in the air above the street, and I can see a long line of elephants, words coming out of their mouths in speech balloons.

No parking, no flyers please, absolutely no loitering, wash your hands, wash your hands. I can’t hear the words, only read them, but I cover my ears anyway, and then Alex is floating beside me, naked, but her breasts are made of something wrong. I look closer and they’re maggots, shaping her breasts, and now they crawl down her body and form a flaccid penis. Her chest is flat, and she’s stirring down there.

Richard is behind me, but he has Bert’s face, like the mask, but it opens when he talks, and the tongue hangs out.

“Let’s all go to the counter,” he says. “Let’s all go to the counter, and get ourselves some snacks.”

I shake my head, confused, and when I try to speak, what I say comes out all wrong.

“This is not a threat,” I say. “You are violating housing laws, and if you do not vacate the building immediately, we will see your actions as a sign of aggression and we will use tear gas. This will be a response to your violent action and it is not a violent action on our part. We are here for peace. Please surrender your violence. Please surrender your violence.” And there’s a brief flash and I’m cowering in an abandoned apartment building and holding a sign that says, “No War Means No Peace.”

I open my eyes slowly and try to establish where I am. As Richard’s bedroom comes into focus, the dream fades. My memories of the last few days are still weak in my head. Did Alex really have a cock made out of maggots? Are her breasts real or not? Did I sleep with her?

I throw off the covers and out in the kitchen Richard is watching the TV. Dr. Verge is on again, holding his wife’s hand and carrying his son in the other arm. “This is a family,” he says. “This is what a family should look like.” The boy is smiling because he has to. You can tell because it’s so perfect, immutable.

Smile for the thousands of people, son. We’re protecting family values. I sit down at the kitchen table beside Richard, and I wonder where the boy goes to school. Richard pours me a cup of coffee.

“Sorry about last night,” he says. “I don’t know why I got upset.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I tell him. There’s no sense telling him that he got too close to her and believed what he wanted to believe. “What are we doing today?” He’s wearing his button-up shirt though, and a pair of dark pants.

“I’ve got work in a half-hour,” Richard says. “Michelle might be stopping by with the books in a bit, and I think she said Alex went to school.”

I take a sip of the coffee.

“I’ll watch TV for a while maybe,” I say.

Richard leaves, and Dr. Verge is still talking on the television. I walk to the front door and pull my boots on. Then I come back in here and sit and wait for him to say “family” one more time. I won’t have to wait long. When he says it, I’m going to put my boot through his face.

Chapter 7

Dr. Verge says “family” and I kick the screen with my boot. It doesn’t break. Fuck the girl in the mall. Every day she feeds off the reinforcement of the beauty myth. It doesn’t matter if she was born Paris Hilton–skinny and blond. Every day she goes out and people treat her better because of how she looks. The world needs balance, and if I have to be unbalanced to supply it, then so be it.

If I could punch her in the gut every day, I would. She doesn’t deserve it? Well, cry me a river. She doesn’t deserve the praise either. Who deserves anything? What does that even mean? She gets the praise, she gets the punch to the gut. That’s justice. If I could suck off a blindfolded straight boy and pull back the curtain every day, I would do that too. Every time a straight person laughingly calls someone a faggot, a straight boy should be tricked into a homosexual act. He should have to live with that fear that someone will find out about him.

Dr. Verge says “family” again, but will it fix anything if I kick the television? I kick it anyway.

I walk down the steps and onto the street, and the sun is bright and hot. I feel like something has been flapping inside my head and it’s finally come free. At the liquor store I buy the biggest bottle they have, something that says XXX on the side, like in a cartoon. Or no, maybe it says something realistic on the side of it. I can’t tell. I lift it up to my lips and drink it right there in line.

The girl at the cash register doesn’t ID me. She takes the money and gives me a receipt and a paper bag to drink it out of. She knows. Walking to Michelle’s house, I drink right from the bottle, the cap in some gutter on the way, and the bottle in its paper bag. I drink it down like I’m my mother.

I remember the way. When I get there, I’ll have to speak like I’m drunk. You have to use the right words in the right order. I’m the drunk man, showing up to fuck her. I have to remember to be obnoxious. There’s a script to be followed.

And why not? I mean, what makes a man and a woman different? What is it that makes people like Dr. Verge wrong about family, about homosexuality, if it isn’t the fact that we’re all the same person with different masks on? How can one mask be better than another? This XXX shit burns going down, but that just means I get to grit my teeth and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. Tough like set theory, but easy like home economics.

Michelle’s at home when I get there, and I push past, into the apartment. I storm to the back and find the bottle of painkillers. “I’m stealing your pills,” I tell her, and I put two on my tongue and wash them down with liquor. Pills and liquor, pills and liquor. We’re getting really dark and gritty now. Everything is shot through a blue filter.

“Alex is a boy now. True or false?” I say. “Richard isn’t some bisexual candy-ass faggot failure. True or false? We should take off our clothes and get right down to it. I’ve never done anything more than gnaw on a girl’s fake cock, and you clearly just need a good visit from the cock deliveryman. True or false?”

“Are you drunk?” Michelle says, reading from the script. She’s the sober woman who’s visited by the drunken lecherous male. She’s reading the script with her hair all shaved off like a dyke, but we can squint and picture any one of the dozens of appropriate TV actresses. Anyway, isn’t this the part of the movie that everyone’s been secretly waiting for, where the lead character and the awesome dyke character get together? It’s awesome that they’re fags and all, but “Kiss! Kiss!”

“Of course I’m drunk,” I tell her. “My nose is red, isn’t it? I’m hiccupping, aren’t I? Now, pencils down! Take your pants off and let’s see if you passed. I want to see what it’s like to enjoy heterosexual privilege. This is what God intended, isn’t it?” Wait, no, that’s not my motivation. I put my hand out to steady myself on the wall. Focus. “I mean, if gender’s nothing, then what the fuck is lust? I’ve been getting hard over a concept, haven’t I? I’ve fucked post-op trannies, dickless and satisfying, because I knew they were men. Well, you’re a man. Spread your fucking labia or whatever the shit it is.”

“I’m not a man, and I’m not going to fuck you,” Michelle says. “I’m not into men. I like women. You know that.”

“So you don’t think that gender’s just a construction then?” I say, and she shakes her head.

“I don’t care what it is,” she says. “It gets me wet to think about my body with another woman. The idea of a penis makes me physically ill. So I choose orgasms. They’re satisfying and plentiful, and if I have to buy into a constructed ideal, so be it.”

Out in the street I drink some more. The bottle’s bottomless. I start walking again. There’s got to be a bar here somewhere, close by. There’s got to be a place with a middle-aged woman drunk in the afternoon. If Michelle won’t fuck me, someone will. Someone will drive me out to their little house in the suburbs and let me try again and again until I’m satisfied that I can do it.

She’s sitting at the bar with flowing black hair and a smile full of teeth. I drop onto the stool next to her and say, “You ever fucked a faggot?” and she nods and says she had a problem for a while, where all her boyfriends went gay after sleeping with her. The bar is empty, so I don’t say, “Oh, that’s right. Having bad sex is probably what makes people gay. Why didn’t the scientists think of that?” Instead I say, “I hope you live somewhere with expansive green lawns.” And she does.

In bed she’s wet and moaning, and my cock’s inside her and there’s no lube and it’s fucking awful. She’s such a woman. I pull out, and she grabs my ass to pull me back in, but I can’t even stay hard. I’ve heard that it’s better if you don’t look. I can’t help it. Jesus. I need a man. Whether that’s giving in to the idea of a valid dichotomy of genders or not, I don’t know. But I need a man. This is awful. It’s like nails on a chalkboard, except both the chalkboard and the nails are my cock.

“I’m sorry,” I say, and she laughs at me, drunk still.

“You too?” she says. “The world is full of impotent men.”

“I’m not impotent,” I tell her. “I’m just disgusted by your sloppy fucking mess.” And I get my pants and I leave. There’s an SUV parked in front of the neighbours’ house, with a baby seat in the back. I take my bottle and I put it right through the back window. “Hey, I christened your boat!” I yell at the house, but nobody comes to the window. Whatever.

I keep walking. I christened their boat, and I named it That Bitch at the Mall Should Have Got a Kick in the Box While She Was Down and it’s a good name for a boat.

Three blocks later I come across a little girl on her way home from school. “Hey, kid,” I say. “Did you know that if you grow up gay, your mommy and daddy won’t have to die?” She looks at me for a minute, and I smile and stagger a little bit. “The instant you let a boy put his cock in you,” I say, “your mommy’s name gets written down on God’s list of people who have to die. Your daddy gets written down on the devil’s list.” She starts to run away and I shout after her, “You’re going to murder your parents, you little straight slut!”

For a second I worry — what if she wasn’t straight? I just assumed she was. But then she’s got nothing to worry about, does she? Her parents will be fine.

Michelle opens the door and lets me in. “Don’t look at me like that,” I say. The room is spinning a little, but I’m fine. I feel better than I have in days. I tell her, “I want to make bumper stickers for politicians and gay-rights advocates.” I sit on the couch, and Michelle sits on the chair. She nods.

“Bumper stickers, huh?” she says.

“Yeah,” I say. “They would read, ‘My other pro-tolerance message is also condescending.’”

As the room spins, I wonder whether you need gender to have lust. What about those androgyny-loving people? They’re still jacking something off though, aren’t they? They’re not just sitting around looking at chrome toasters and having instant orgasms. Are they? “I couldn’t do it,” I tell her. “I don’t know how you can deal with that shit. It’s like a meat shop down there. I need stability, you know?”

Michelle rolls her eyes.

“I’m not going to get into an argument with you over the pros and cons of our genitals,” she says. “You’ve grown up with yours, and I’ve grown up with mine. Penises seem unnatural to me. Different strokes, that’s all. Have you seen the news in the past few hours?”

I shake my head, and she says, “They found the books at one of the schools, and they shut it down while people from the church searched the lockers and classrooms. It was the school you and Richard went to.”

“I told you we should have broken into people’s houses,” I say, and she shakes her head.

“No, this is great,” she says. “I talked to Richard on the phone. He wants to call the newspapers, claiming responsibility for the books. He’s gonna go out of his way after work. Give them some details that nobody else could have, and say it was done by gay children’s icons everywhere.”

“We should go tonight,” I say, “and break into people’s houses. Put them on their shelves.”

“We got what we wanted,” Michelle says.

“We didn’t want publicity. This wasn’t just about getting on the news,” I say. “We wanted those kids to find the books and read them. We wanted to actually try and influence the youth of today, not just give their parents more ammunition.”

Michelle stands up.

“Well, I’m not breaking into anyone’s house,” she says.

In her kitchen I call Richard at work. “Tonight,” I say. “We go and deliver more books. The same way we got that TV, you know?”

“I’m not,” Richard says. “I’m going out dancing tonight, to celebrate. You should come.”

“Celebrate what?” I say. “How many kids do you think actually saw those books?” But he has to go, and I hang up the phone in Michelle’s empty kitchen. She’s sitting in the living room, watching TV. “Do you have a knapsack I can borrow?” I ask her, and she nods.

I pick up the phone book while she’s getting it, and I flip it open to Hubert, J. The address is right there, and I tear the page out. That whole neighbourhood is probably perfect. Anyway, Mr. Hubert won’t be home from work for a while, and it’s across town. Michelle brings me the knapsack, and I fill it with books.

“You’re drunk,” she reminds me, and I nod.

“Wish me luck,” I say.

On the street I flag down a guy on a bike. He stops beside me and grins in his shiny glasses. “Are you heterosexual?” I ask him, and his grin gets wider.

“Fuckin’ eh,” he says, and I kick him in the dick. He topples over, and I snatch his bike up and I ride.

I wonder for a moment whether he would still be heterosexual if his junk got all infected and they had to cut it off. Masculine, feminine, neuter. The toaster fuckers would love him.

“Thanks a lot!” I shout as I turn the corner. “I hope you don’t have to fuck toasters!”

I ditch the bike a block from Mrs. Hubert’s, and I walk the rest of the way thinking what I have to say to her, about gender and construction and the futility of trying to unravel the nature of our ideas. Every new hidden layer can be deconstructed. I wonder if she’ll be the way I pictured her, skinny and Botoxed and my last hope of the straight world understanding.

But when I get there, there are two cars in the driveway, and I can see a man standing in the living room. It makes me sort of ill to think that I want the understanding of the straight world, and I sit down on the curb. Well, understanding is better than hatred, isn’t it? It’s better than tolerance. Fuck. My knife is in my hands and open, and I’m standing now, walking toward the cars.

I slit the tires and walk back to the bushes where I left the bike. I drive back toward the Hubert household, pumping the pedals as fast as I can, up onto their expansive green lawn and into the side of their car. There’s glass and blood and I’m falling.

“Are you all right?” the man says, and I sit up. I’m in the living room, and a small, squat woman is reaching for my forehead with a wet facecloth. It’s warm. “Can you hear me?” he says. He turns to the woman. “He’s drunk.”

“Have you got kids?” I say. “Have you ever thought that maybe things don’t have to work the way they do? I mean, it has to be. I can wear makeup and breast forms, and I can be something else. I’m more than just this —” I gesture at my pants “— aren’t I? If it was all gone, wouldn’t I still be me?”

“He’s delirious,” the man says, but Mrs. Hubert is looking at me, and she knows.

“Go and get him some water,” she says, and when he’s gone she says, “Are you the boy who keeps calling?” but I’m already standing and looking around for Michelle’s backpack. There’s no reason for me to be here.

“Have you got a son?” I say, and then push a book into her hands. “Take this.”

The bike is fucked, and I start walking back the way I came. A bus comes and I climb on and sit at the back. Richard isn’t home when I get there, and I lean against the door instead of picking the lock, even though I know he wouldn’t mind. I fall asleep.

I’m made of insects, changing and growing, forming breasts and a cock that stretches for blocks, sliding into the mouths of strangers, men on their way home from work, their lips forced open to accommodate my cock as it explores their whole body from the inside. They choke on it, these straight men in their hats. I push the insects that form my breasts, and they move and then regroup to form the tits again. There are children climbing up my body, trying to suckle at the breasts. I push the breasts again, and the insects move again.

I panic, because the insects are trying to make me something I’m not. I dig at them, pushing my hands deeper and deeper beneath the insects to find myself, but all I get are handfuls of beetles and flies. There’s nothing underneath.

Richard wakes me up, and I climb to my feet.

“Why didn’t you let yourself in?” he says, and I shrug.

“Just felt like falling asleep here,” I tell him, and he nods.

“Well, I hope you’re ready for a night of dancing,” he says. “Because I’m in a fucking good mood. You should have heard the reporter on the other end of the phone. I told her it was Bert and Ernie and Velma and Wonder Woman. Let’s turn the news on,” he says. He walks to the TV, which is lying on its back, and he lifts it up.

It still works.

Chapter 8

They found the books we made. So what? Nobody would have read them to the children anyway. In the end, there would be nobody there to walk the children through, page by page, and explain and reinforce those ideas about what’s normal. Kids can’t just pick up a book about a tranny and understand. They need their parents to help them. And their parents never would.

What we really need to do is replace their parents. My anger is so intense now that it isn’t even anger. I’m floating. The sun outside the window is shining through me. Children are too important to be left to their parents.

I open Richard’s closet and pick out a dark blue suit, nice but not flashy. It says “politics” more than anything and it fits me snugly. Richard has a credit card in the top drawer of his nightstand, and I slide it into my pocket. I find my lockpick set, and I take that too. I feel like a mobster. I want to fix my hair with a switchblade comb, to slick it back all wet and black.

I call Michelle.

“Can I come over?” I say. “I have a plan.”

She’s still eating breakfast when I arrive, sugared puffs of wheat. She has a bruise on her shoulder in the shape of a mouth, so fresh you can still see individual teeth. I can hear Alex singing to punk rock in another room. I take my suit jacket off and fold it over a chair.

“We should take the remaining books to a bookstore and donate them,” I say. “We’ll leave them in a box out front, with an anonymous note. The stores can sell them and give the profits to charity,” I say. “Or they can just give them away. At least the books will get into homes and someone will read them. And we won’t get arrested. It’s perfect.”

Michelle nods.

Alex comes in. She runs her hands through Michelle’s hair and says, “I want to do more. Every day we should do something bigger. I want to be on the news every night.”

“We will,” I say. “The cartoon heterosexual paradigm hates to be fucked with. By the end of the day, we’ll be on the run from their cartoon lawmen with their big black billy clubs.” Alex grins. “Pack a bag,” I tell her. “You too,” I say to Michelle. “I have a plan. I have so many plans that my head feels heavy. We’ll be gone for a few days.”

Richard comes to pick us up in his car and everyone piles inside. The books go in the trunk.

“This is a good idea,” he says, smiling in the driver’s seat. “I’m glad that people will actually get to read the books, instead of just burning them on TV.” He puts his hand on my shoulder, and I wonder if he’s fucked that boy in the photocopier room again. I want to kiss him, to taste the other man’s come on his lips, but I don’t. What if there’s no taste at all?

Our first stop is Venus Envy, a sex shop downtown. Richard parks the car and we climb out.

“Can I do the talking?” Alex says. “I think the girl who runs it, Maggie, has a crush on me.” She grabs a stack of the books from the box. She and Richard haven’t spoken yet, but it’s none of my business. Michelle laughs while Alex fixes her hair in the reflection of the car window.

“Are you sure that Maggie’s the one with the crush?” she says, and Alex doesn’t answer. Our masks are in the trunk beside the box of books. I can’t stop staring at them.

Inside the store, Alex smiles the whole time. She puts the books down in front of the manager and she says, “We thought you might be able to sell these, or give them away.”

“What are they?” The manager, Maggie, lifts up one of the books and grins. “These are the books from the news?” she says.

“You didn’t get them from us,” Alex says, and she leans across the counter. “We could get in a lot of trouble,” she confides. “Our organization has made a lot of people very angry. We’re above the law!”

There’s a whole wall of dildos in here. The lighting is calm.

Michelle rolls her eyes at Alex and says, “You should donate any money you get from them to a charity of your choice. The important thing is that mothers who care will read them to their children.”

Maggie leafs through the book.

“I know people who work at a queer summer camp,” she says. “I can arrange to get copies to each of the kids there. And I’m gonna steal a copy for my girlfriend Jesse. She would love this. She’s working on a book too.”

“Are you and Jesse, uh, exclusive?” Alex asks. She’s playing with her hair again. “Have you ever gone out with a revolutionary?” she says. “Maybe you need to be overthrown.”

In the car Richard kisses me. He tastes like mint. We drive to the next store, and Richard and I wait outside. We make out in the car for the next three bookstores too. It’s nice to just make out, to kiss and touch his chest and not move right to sex. It drives me insane and it calms me down.

While we drive around, Alex goes on and on about the girl from Venus Envy. “She’s going to see me on the news one night,” she says, “and then what will her girlfriend have on me? I’m doing something. I’m going to save the world. We all are,” she adds, grinning around at us. “We’re going to save the world, aren’t we?”

“One child at a time,” I tell her.

After the last bookstore, I climb into the driver’s seat and Michelle says, “Where to now? Food?”

“We’ve got one more stop,” I say.

“That was the last of the books,” Michelle says. Alex and Richard are sitting in the back seat, quietly. They still haven’t spoken.

“We aren’t dropping off,” I say. “We’re picking up.” I remember the address, and it takes us twenty minutes to drive across town. I fix my tie and turn the car into the driveway of the school.

“I’ll just be one second,” I say. “Keep the engine running.”

It’s a huge, gothic-looking building. The most expensive and exclusive private school in the city. It houses grades primary right through high school. The money that these parents pay for tuition isn’t even a real number. I don’t feel jealous about money at all these days. It seems like part of a make-believe world that people create for themselves. A TV that costs $1,800 just sits in some straight person’s home, waiting for me to steal it.

It takes me five minutes to find the head office. I smile as wide as I can, and I say, “I’m here from Dr. Verge’s office. Sorry to trouble you again.”

After that I walk casually out of the school, holding David’s hand. We get to the car and Michelle is staring at me, confused. Alex and Richard don’t look up until I pull open the back door on Richard’s side and tell David to climb into the middle.

“Everyone,” I say. “This is David. Say hello, David.”

He’s silent.

“I told them I was one of Dr. Verge’s assistants,” I say, sitting behind the wheel. Nobody else says anything. “I said that we needed David here for another televised save-the-family rally.”

In the back seat, David sits looking straight ahead. I wonder if his father has given him instructions not to speak to the help. I wonder how he’s going to like being a little girl.

“Children are too important to leave to their parents,” I say.

Alex is grinning.

“His dad is that anti-gay-marriage guy?”

I nod, and then focus on driving.

Michelle turns to face the boy in the back seat.

“Have you ever worn a dress?” she says.

In a thrift store, I buy two dresses, one in my size and one in David’s, because I think if he sees me in the dress he won’t feel as weird about wearing one himself. Mine is nice, a simple black dress that I drape a chrome-spiked belt over. My boots are covered in mud, and with the stubble I have a confusing look that I find appealing. I have a small clutch that I keep the lockpick set in.

Out in the car, I pass the dress to David.

“Put this on,” I say.

He unfolds it and holds it up.

“This is for a girl,” he says.

“I’m not a girl,” I say. “I’m wearing a dress.”

“You’re probably a gay,” David says. There’s an edge to his voice, a tone that he’s gotten from his father. “You wear dresses in parades. You think you’re a girl anyway. I’m not gay.”

“How old are you?” Richard says.

“Eight years old,” David says. He folds the dress carefully and hands it back to me.

“Put it on,” Alex says. “Or we’ll make you put it on.”

Michelle turns to look at her, but Richard speaks first.

“Right,” he says. “We’ll just hold him down and pull his clothes off. Then we’ll force him to dress up like a girl. I’m sure that on top of kidnapping it won’t make that much difference if we forcibly remove his clothes.”

“I have a knife,” David says. He pulls out a little Swiss army knife. And carefully forces the blade out with his fingernails.

It’s Alex’s idea to refuse to feed him until he puts the dress on. At the truck stop I keep the doors locked while Michelle runs inside and buys us some food. The hamburgers are greasy and I leave mine half-eaten in the bag.

“This is good,” Alex says, and she forces herself to smile. “Mmmmm.”

Michelle and Richard eat quietly.

David stares out the window.

When we’re back on the highway, he says, “Where are we going? Where’s my dad?” and Alex sticks out her hand to shake.

“I’m Bert,” she says. She points to Michelle. “That’s Ernie.”

“Bert and Ernie are puppets,” David says.

Richard offers his hand too. “I’m Wonder Woman,” he says. “Don’t laugh.”

I meet David’s eyes in the mirror. “I’m Velma,” I say.

We drive for hours, and I push the car too fast, wind coming in the window and slipping up my dress. I can feel every hair. The material waves and flaps. I hate driving. On the radio they’re playing country music. I have no idea if they’re talking about us on the news or not. I don’t care.

I meet David’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

“You don’t like dresses?” I say. “Why, because boys don’t wear dresses?” I say. “You only do what your father says you can do. What do you like? Race cars?” I press my foot down, and the car goes even faster. “Did you know that I’m a race-car driver?”

“You are not,” he says. He looks sullen.

There’s a car ahead of me, in the right lane, and I speed toward it. At the last minute, I swerve out to pass and my stomach lurches to the right. We pass the car and I swerve back in front.

“I used to race at Daytona,” I say. “I had a car with those rims that keep spinning after the car stops. I think they would have kept spinning anyway. I never found out. Do you know why?” I say, and I lurch the car to the left again, passing an SUV. “Because I never stopped.”

We drive all day and into the night. It’s Michelle who sees it first. “Hey, stop the car,” she says. “What the fuck is that?”

“What?” Richard says, leaning into the front and trying to see what she’s pointing at.

“It’s gone.”

“What was it?”

“Just stop the car,” she says, and I pull over to the side of the road. We all climb out, even David, who hasn’t spoken in hours. Michelle stands looking up at the dark night sky, with its slowly drifting clouds. “There!” she says, and she points.

There’s a cut in the darkness of the sky, an incision, with light shining out of it. It’s a green that’s too bright to be natural. It looks like the trail of an airplane, but lit up and too perfect.

“Is it a comet?” Richard says.

The line is broken in two now. It’s still as straight as an incision, but there’s a gap. Then it fills in.

“What the fuck,” Richard says. “It’s so green.”

“It’s a laser,” David says. “It’s a laser beam.”

“Lasers are red,” Richard says, and David shakes his head.

“There are green lasers too,” he says. “Look how straight it is.” A cloud drifts into the beam above us. “It’s behind these trees,” he says.

“Weird,” Alex says. “Can we get out of here? It’s creeping me out. It looks like something out of a science-fiction movie.”

“Let’s go and find it!” David says.

“I’m sure it’s past your bedtime,” Alex says. “Let’s get back in the car and go find a hotel. Come on.” She grabs Richard by the arm, and it’s the first time they’ve touched today.

He looks startled and then turns to me.

“Yeah, let’s get going,” he says.

I can’t stop staring at the laser beam. I can’t see the whole beam, just streaks where it hits cloud or mist in the air. It’s obvious that it’s a laser now, but for a brief moment I really did think there was a tear in the sky. When the end comes, I hope it’s as strange as that. I hope that the sky tears open and the world is washed with colours that we’ve never seen before.

David is looking at me.

“Can we go and see it?” he says.

I look back at the car. Alex and Richard are already inside, and Michelle has her door open. She’s standing and watching us.

“You guys try and find a hotel,” I say. “Grab Richard’s cellphone for me.” Michelle leans into the car and says something. I see Richard pass her the phone. “Just give us a call when you find a place to stay tonight,” I say. “We’re gonna go find this laser.”

Michelle hands me the phone and looks me up and down. “In that dress?” she says. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. You’re going to get the shit kicked out of you in front of a little kid.”

“I’ll be fine,” I say. I turn and look up again. The laser is gone, and for a moment I feel sick with disappointment. Then it slices into view again. “Hey, David,” I say. “You’ve got your knife, right?”

“Yeah,” he says.

“See?” I say to Michelle. “David will protect me.” I put the cellphone into the clutch I’m carrying.

Chapter 9

David is trying to tell me about lasers as we make our way through the woods. He says, “No, that’s not what I said. I said ‘coherent light.’ I have a book. It means that the light waves are in phase with each other.”

“They’re what?”

“They’re lined up!” he says.

It’s hard to hear him, because he’s walking a few feet ahead of me and he won’t turn around when he talks. My dress gets caught on a bramble again, and this time it tears. The trees block out the sky, but every once in a while I can catch a glimpse of the laser’s light through the branches. It looks like it’s getting closer. I can see the beam all the time now, not just when it’s touching a cloud. It looks like a strand of mint dental floss, pulled tight across the sky.

“You know an awful lot for an eight-year-old,” I say. “Are you some sort of scientist?”

“I’m going to be a physicist,” he says. He climbs up on a rock. “Like Richard Feynman. I’m going to learn how to do everything. I have books on mathematics and chemistry, and maybe if we make another atomic bomb I can work on that too. I’m going to learn to pick locks and pick up women like he talks about in his books.” He jumps down from the rock and turns to grin at me.

“I can teach you how to pick locks,” I say, and he laughs.

“Richard Feynman won the Nobel prize,” he says. “He was smart like Einstein, but he was funnier. You probably work at a hair salon, or with computers. You probably work at Kentucky Fried Chicken,” David says. “How would you know how to pick locks?”

“I taught myself,” I say. We come to the edge of the woods. “Picking locks is a way of making sense of the world on your own, without people explaining what things are for,” I say. “Picking locks is like wearing a dress if you’re a boy.”

This is someone’s backyard, and above their satellite dish and chimney the laser is brighter than ever. As a cloud drifts over it, a point of brilliant green appears, wavering up and down with the shape of the cloud.

“It looks closer now,” I say.

“What will we do when we get there?” David says.

“It’s probably up on someone’s roof. Maybe they’ll let us inside to see it.”

We walk in silence for a while, David running ahead, across people’s lawns, but never too far ahead. He must know by now that something weird is going on. I don’t think he understands that we’re kidnapping him. My anger has worn off. I’m not thinking about saving him, about opening his mind to the knowledge that it’s okay to be different, for boys to dress like girls. I’m not thinking about reversing the damage his father has done to him. All I’m thinking about is finding the laser. I don’t know what I’ll do afterward, but right now he and I are going to find that laser together.

On our right there are a few men sitting out on their porch. They’re leaning back in their lawn chairs, and as we approach I can hear them talking. The first words I can make out are “What the fuck?”

“Don’t pay any attention to them,” I say to David, before the first of them even begins catcalling. “Just keep walking until we get to the corner.”

“Hey, faggot, isn’t he a little young for you?” a voice yells. “That’s a nice dress.”

“Yeah,” says another. “Is that your wedding dress? Are you going to try and marry him? I don’t think they’ve made pedophile marriages legal yet, have they?”

There are three of them, and I have to force myself to keep walking. I want to turn around and rush them. I want to bloody my elbows and my knees with them. I don’t want to hurt anyone in front of David though.

“Hey, kid, is that guy bothering you?”

“Leave us alone,” David yells, and he starts walking faster. We get around the corner, and I can see that his face is flushed. “Why are you wearing that?” he says. “They wouldn’t have yelled if you weren’t dressed up like a gaylord.”

“They yelled because they were assholes,” I say.

“They yelled because you’re dressed up like a girl. You’re a faggot,” David says, and I want to slap his face. Instead I grab his wrist, hard, and pull him up a lawn and into the backyard of the house on the corner. We cut through backyards until we’re behind the house with the drunken assholes. I can hear them out front, laughing to one another.

“They don’t let pedophiles get married too, do they?” one says, and they all laugh, reliving their moment of glory.

I open my clutch and pull out the lockpick set.

“What’s that?” David whispers. I lead him to their back door, and I get down on one knee. “Is that a lockpick?” He watches, fascinated, as I slide one of the picks into the lock, using my other hand to work the tension wrench. “You really can pick locks,” he says.

“We can’t talk when we get inside,” I say. “We have to be very quiet. We’re just going to sneak in and then sneak out, okay?”

“What are we doing?”

“We’re going to steal a toaster,” I say. “They made fun of us and said we were getting married. Well, people always give toasters at weddings. We’re going to collect our wedding present.”

“I’ve never stolen anything,” David whispers.

“Well, I won’t tell if you don’t.”

The lock moves, and I let out a sigh of relief. I push the door open a fraction of an inch, sliding the picks back into their case, and the case back into my purse. We have no flashlight, and so we move very slowly, waiting for our eyes to adjust.

David runs across the kitchen to grab a toaster, and he pulls the cord from the wall.

“Got it!” he says.

The lights come on, and a man steps into the kitchen heavily. It’s one of the men from the front lawn.

“What the fuck?” he says. He pushes David to the side and grabs the front of my dress. “How the fuck did you get in my house?”

David’s watching, his eyes wide, and there has to be a way out of this without violence. He’s eight years old. I shouldn’t have brought him into this house. Fucking Christ.

“Listen,” I say. “He’s only eight. We’ll just leave, all right? We’ll forget this ever happened.” He has my chest hair through the dress, and I want to bring my knee up and into his crotch. He isn’t that much bigger than me. I wonder what he’d tell his friends if he got stomped by a faggot.

He shoves me against the wall and grabs the toaster out of David’s hands. He starts wrapping the cord around his fist. My own hands are fists now, and all I can think to say is “David, close your eyes.” This fucker has a punch in the throat coming. But before he can step forward, and before my fist can come up, he drops the toaster and staggers to the side, his hand on his back. His hand comes back with blood on it.

“What the fuck?” he says.

David is staring at him in shock, his little knife still in his hand. There is something smeared on the blade. I grab David’s wrist and we’re out the door and into the neighbours’ backyard before I can even start thinking. I can’t believe he stabbed the guy. Eight years old. I’m the most irresponsible kidnapper ever.

From the front yard we can hear yelling. I slow down to see if I can hear what they’re doing, but David shoves me from behind.

“Run!” David says, pushing past me.

We run. Above us, the laser slices through the clouds. I can’t stop looking up. David is looking up while he runs too.

“It’s close,” I say. “It’s way closer than before. It can’t be more than a few blocks from here.”

And then we aren’t running from anything anymore. We’re running toward the laser. We’re pushing through bushes from one backyard into the next, our eyes on the clouds and that beacon in the sky.

Chapter 10

We stop on a street that’s all dark, some new suburb with skeleton houses and dirt everywhere. The laser looks thick in the sky now. I can see it all. David sits down on the curb and cries. He’s still holding the little knife in his hand. He ran all this way with an open knife. I didn’t even notice.

“We’re almost to the laser!” I say, but David just cries harder. “Don’t you want to see?” He shakes his head, and all my excitement is gone. I can’t pretend anymore. I’m glad he’s not wearing a dress right now. What if that fucker back at the house had turned on David first? What if he’d done something before I could react?

“I want to go back to the car,” David says, and I sit down on the curb beside him and pull him into a hug. I squeeze him hard, and he shakes against me, silently.

“Richard will call soon,” I say. “He’ll come and get us, and we’ll go get some ice cream or something.” There has to be an all-night ice-cream place somewhere.

“I don’t want any ice cream,” David says. He looks down at the knife in his hand. Then he folds it up and puts it back in his pocket.

When Richard calls, he says, “We can’t just take him home. Are you crazy? We’d be arrested three blocks away.” Someone in the background on his end says something. “Alex says we should leave him somewhere and then call the cops to tell them where he is.”

“And how long would it take the cops to get there?” I say. “We just leave him in some McDonald’s by himself to wait for the cops?”

“I don’t want any McDonald’s,” David says.

“He doesn’t even like McDonald’s,” I say.

“Nobody said anything about McDonald’s, man.” Richard pauses. “Listen,” he says, “there’s got to be a safe place we can leave him.”

“Okay,” I say. “I know where.”

“Where?”

“Come get us,” I say. “Just you, Richard. We don’t need a car full of people.”

“Where are you?” he says.

I look around.

“Hey,” I say to David. “Run over and take a look at that street sign.”

In the car I sit in the back with David. I tell Richard how to get to Mrs. Hubert’s neighbourhood. I straighten my dress and pull my seat belt on. David isn’t crying anymore, but he’s staring out the window.

“Hey, have you got the internet?” I say, and David nods without looking at me. “There’s a book you can download off the internet called The MIT Guide to Picking Locks,” I say. I have my lockpick set in hand, and I reach out to place it in his hand. “You just read it again and again until it starts to make sense to you.” David is looking down at the lockpicks. “There are other guides and things on the internet, but the MIT one is the best, I think.”

“Okay,” David says.

Richard parks his car two blocks away, and David and I walk under the trees toward Mrs. Hubert’s house. I want to say something to make him feel better about stabbing the guy, but I don’t know what I’d say. I don’t know what it would mean if I convinced an eight-year-old that it was all right to put a knife in someone. Would it be worse to have him grow up afraid of his own ability to be violent? What if he got so afraid that he wouldn’t defend himself?

“Hey, David.” I stop walking and sit down on the curb. David stops too. He’s holding the lockpick set in his fist, and in the streetlight he looks more tired than scared. “Do you think it’s okay to hit a girl?”

He looks at me for a long time.

Mrs. Hubert’s husband answers the door and takes one look at us and closes the door again. I ring the doorbell once more, and this time Mrs. Hubert answers. She looks tired too, and I realize I have no idea what time it is.

“Can you call his dad in the morning?” I say, putting my hand on David’s back.

“Is he the boy that’s gone missing?” Mrs. Hubert asks, and I nod. “He’s okay?” She kneels down in front of him, and I kneel beside him.

“Mrs. Hubert will take care of you until your dad comes to get you, all right?” I lift up his hand and tap on the lockpick set. “You keep this hidden, or your dad will take it away. You keep it a secret,” I say.

Mrs. Hubert is looking at me now. “What about you?” she says. “You look tired.”

Later on, Richard will refer to this whole thing as “making the drop” and he’ll talk about the time we “burlap-sacked the son of a political figure.” Richard will tell the story of this meeting like we had planned it this way all along. We get the kid, take him out, have a homophobe shout and threaten him, and have the kid stick up for himself, stab the asshole, and we drop him off before bedtime. If he mentions Mrs. Hubert at all, he probably won’t have her say, “You look tired.” He’ll probably have her say something else, something trite and expected and designed to make us look like heroes.

He definitely won’t tell anyone that I stand back up and smile at her. He won’t tell anyone that I say, “I am tired.”

David gives me a hug goodbye, and as I walk back to the car I try to think of something to tell Richard. I try to think of something we can do tonight, the four of us, some organization that needs their windows smashed, some slogan we can spray paint on every storefront.

Back in the car, Richard says, “What happened?”

I sit, looking out the window at the suburbs we pass, still trying to think of something we can do.

“She said she’d give the police a call in a half an hour, so that we could get far enough away.”

“Really?”

“She gave me a hug too,” I say.

I should have washed the blood off David’s knife, I think. I roll down the window and stick my hand out, enjoying the feeling of the wind on my skin.

Chapter 1

Is this really where I want to be, stacking printer paper in an office-supply store? Seriously? For how much longer? We’re all going to die. Death is taking another lick of my lollipop, and God knows how many he’ll take before he gets frustrated and just bites into it.

So I’m quitting. Happy birthday to me. I’m almost thirty. The work isn’t terrible. But it’s never the actual work that’s terrible, is it? It’s the customers. Jesus, fuck — the customers.

A customer walks over and sets the printer paper down, already staring at the little screen where the price appears.

“That’s not the right price,” he says and slaps down a flyer opened to a picture of printer paper. He’s jabbing at it.

“That’s last week’s flyer, sir,” I say.

“Excuse me?”

“That’s an outdated flyer. We have copies of the new flyer here, if you like.”

“You sent me this flyer, and I drove all the way downtown because of the price promised right here.” He jabs again. “Now if you’re just going to give me more faggot excuses, I’d like to speak to your manager.”

Classy. So I pick up the phone and I call Wallace, my manager. Then the customer and I wait in silence. He’s probably sixty years old. Dressed nice, but not fancy. He has a shirt and tie, but no blazer. It’s a shirt that’s been worn again and again, no crisp corners. A workingman, salt of the earth.

“How can I help you, sir?” Wallace says, coming behind the cash register with me, smiling. The customer is nicer now. Of course he is. I watch while he explains the issue politely. He shows Wallace the flyer. Wallace hits a few buttons on the keyboard, and everyone’s happy. The customer gets the discount he wants.

It’s always the people who are paid the least who have to take the most shit. Otherwise Captain Angry there would go buy his five-dollar printer paper at another establishment.

When he’s gone, I turn to Wallace.

“That guy called me a faggot,” I say, and Wallace claps me on the shoulder warmly. He’s a nice guy, I think. Not the brightest guy in the world, but mostly good. I get a bit uncomfortable when he talks about women, like he’s not really talking about people. But in general, Wallace means well.

“Don’t take it personally,” Wallace says. “Everybody gets what they deserve eventually. In his next life, that guy’ll probably come back as a faggot himself.” Wallace walks off, and I’m left standing there holding the receipt for one packet of printer paper. That doesn’t make me feel better at all.

Wallace wouldn’t have said it if he knew I slept with men, I know that. He’s not a mean guy, just stupid. Oh, so stupid. I stand behind the counter and I ring through people’s orders, just waiting for one of them to say something. By lunch, I can feel a pressure behind my right eye that I am certain is my anger. It keeps on building until I don’t know what to do with it.

In the faggot lunchroom, Wallace is laughing with Mike, watching the faggot TV. I’ve been standing behind the register all day, angry. I haven’t been able to think of anything faggot else, and I bet if I fucking faggot asked him right faggot now, he wouldn’t be able to even tell me what he said. Long forgotten. Unimportant.

The anger isn’t making me feel better, but you know what does? Sexual harassment. The look on Wallace’s face when I say, “Jesus, Wallace. You been working out? Your ass looks amazing today.” Just a flash of surprise and confusion. A bit of shame. And then I’m gone, back up the stairs to my cash register.

I’m smiling now. I feel good, less helpless. I wonder if this is why straight men sexually harass women, to prove to themselves that they have power. They get yelled at by their own bosses and head back to the office to take it out on their secretaries.

Hey, Janet, your tits look good in that top.

Later that afternoon, when Wallace is helping some guy pick a printer, I walk past him again, and this time I clap him on the shoulder and look pointedly down at his crotch.

“Come on, Wallace. Hide your erection, will you?”

“What?”

“It’s impolite to walk around with candy unless you’re gonna share.”

I feel like a little kid, pissing on the bully’s gym clothes. Sure, there are probably better ways to handle this, but none of them seem like as much fun. It’s better to make it a joke. And it is a joke, isn’t it?

I get off work earlier than Clay does, so I usually walk down and meet him at the casino. Clay has birthday plans for me tonight. A surprise. I’m leaning back against the hood of his car when he comes out. He’s still in his uniform, his security badge yellow under the parking-garage lights. He looks good in that uniform. He looks dangerous. I have a bit of a weakness for dangerous-looking men.

I kiss him hello and then, in the car, tell him about the customer, and about Wallace. But it’s my birthday, and mostly I want to talk about something else.

“What’re we doing tonight?” I say, and Clay smiles.

“Tonight, sir, there’s a meteor shower,” he says. “I don’t know if you heard. It’s kind of a big deal. We’re going to go out to the country, where there are no streetlights, and we’re going to watch the sky fall.”

This is Clay’s birthday surprise for me. It’s hard to believe he even remembers the meteor shower. He’s got no interest in anything like this, but I must have gone on about it one too many times, my voice all earnest, waving my hands in the air while I talked.

Clay gets excited about things too. It’s one of the things I love about him. He gets an idea in his head and it lights him up. There’s not a cynical bone in his body. Everything is fun; everything’s an adventure. It doesn’t matter what the plan is. He has dozens of plans. Let’s go to the movie on Tuesday. Let’s go to China. Let’s learn how to leave no trace at all in the world’s databases and let’s live off the grid. Let’s learn to knife fight. We saw an ad about that: learn to knife fight using training methods developed for Russian Special Forces. The flyer ended with an ominous “You don’t win a knife fight. You survive.” There is always more room in our lives for something so deadly serious.

Clay’s enthusiasm is infectious. Now he’s talking about Wallace again. He wants to come into the store wearing a leather vest. I have no idea where Clay would even find a leather vest. He wants to wear a big fake cop moustache. A disguise. Wallace has never seen him, which makes me feel weird, now that we’ve said it out loud. Clay’s never been into the store. I’ve never been into the casino either.

“I’ll seem like just any other customer,” Clay says. “Oh, this is going to be brilliant.” He’s repeating himself now. This is how you know when he’s really excited. He goes around in circles, and the idea is more exciting to him every time. He wants to get his friends to do it too. Every queer he knows. Go in and blow Wallace kisses. Pat Wallace’s ass affectionately after he’s been helpful. Ask Wallace for his phone number.

When Clay’s around, I feel like I’m more exciting too. That’s a good quality to have in a gentleman friend. I come up with plans of my own for us. Let’s try to befriend the squirrels that live in the walls and attic. Let’s go get some candy and stay up all night watching horror movies. Let’s sleep over in a graveyard, so the dead can visit us in our dreams.

I don’t fall in love easily. It takes a long time, and then, when I have fallen in love, I’m still not sure. I’m suspicious of myself. What if tomorrow I don’t feel the same? I have to wait, to be sure. And I wait and wait. I think I might be at that stage now, with Clay. I’ve been waiting for a while. I have dreams about telling him.

We drop the car off at the apartment and unlock our bikes. I love biking in the dark. I didn’t think I’d get a chance to see the meteor shower tonight. I thought for sure he’d take me out to dinner or to some movie. Meteor showers are amazing because to the human eye it just looks like little moving points of light, thin streaks of light. Except it isn’t. It’s debris falling to earth. Fast and burning and where do they come from? I’m not sure. It’s little bits of something else. Space always makes me think of infinity. The universe just keeps going and going and, when I think about it, it actually feels like my thoughts have to get bigger to understand. And then I get scared.

We bike out to the dark and find a perfect spot. We’re in a field, with a hill blocking the streetlights from the road, the best place for us to stretch out and watch the sky fall. We lie down side by side on the grass and dirt, watching. Beside me, Clay says, “There!” and I see it too, the first streak of thin light.

We watch for a while, until I get scared thinking about the yawning void of space and the maddening smallness of our solar system in it, and the smallness of our planet in that solar system and of my own voice in the dark, and I almost say, “I love you,” right then and there, but instead I pull him on top of me.

I like having his weight on me. I like the feel of his breath against my cheek, and I like the feeling of being trapped too. Pinned down. He kisses me and smiles, and then tries to roll off me. I hold on to him tightly.

He pins my wrists to the dirt. He stretches me out so my belly’s exposed, and he kisses my neck. He puts his mouth right up against my ear and says, “Nobody can hear you out here. Cry for help all you want.”

And I struggle against his grip. He pins my wrists with one hand, and with the other he pulls my belt open, shoves his hand down to wrap cool around my cock, and I say, “No.” And I try to pull free.

We forget all about watching the stars. He kisses me and I struggle against him just enough. “Let’s move,” he says. We stand up and we kiss in the moonlight with the stars falling and no cars anywhere and it’s all very perfect and romantic and all I can think is I want him inside me. I want him to press his finger inside me.

There’s a tree here, and he pushes me against it, with the dark field behind him. I spin us so that he’s against the tree, and I put his hand in my hair and make a fist of it. He’s smiling. He forces me down to my knees, and I squeeze the front of his pants. Gripping a cock through them that isn’t fully erect yet, but doesn’t really need to be. I pull at the button. I open my mouth, looking up at him, and he takes my hair in both his fists and shoves my face down on his cock. My lips are forced open. Then further. I’m still struggling, my hands waving helplessly in the air.

He’s hard now. I make a choking sound as he reaches the back of my throat, and I struggle. He pulls my head back to let me gasp for air and to force me to look up at him. He spits on me. His spit is thick on my face, and he says, “Whore.” He shoves me down on his cock again, fucks my face while I dig my fingers in the bark of the tree, the zipper of his pants cutting against my lips and cheek, again and again. Then my hand is up his shirt, pulling at his nipple and leaving streaks of dirt on his chest while he uses my mouth. Then he pauses.

“Is this okay?” he says, looking down, and I can only nod.

Yes.

I want him to come on the ground here in front of me, or to come across my lips. I want him to push my face into the dirt and pull my pants roughly down just far enough so he can get at my asshole. My knees are wet and cold through my pants.

Clay pulls me back by the hair and forces me to look up at him again.

“My turn!” he says.

And so I twist his arm behind his back and push him against the tree with his shirt pulled up. The bark is digging into him, and I’ve got his pants pulled down so I can get at him. My free hand is wet with my own spit, my finger pushing at his asshole. I use my body to hold his arm twisted between us. My teeth are tearing at the condom wrapper. I wrap my hand around his throat while I enter him. “If you make one sound, I’ll kill you,” I whisper in his ear.

When I come, I panic a bit, because I can suddenly see everything. I have my hand around his throat, and I feel like I am just returning to my senses, and did we go too far?

But Clay reaches up and kisses me on the cheek and then on my mouth and he says, “You’re beautiful.”

Afterward, still half-naked, we watch the night sky. His chest hair is soft in the dark and I rest my head on him. The dirt and twigs are digging into the skin of my hip. My pants are still around my ankles. This is so quiet and would be such a perfect time to say, “I love you.” But you can’t say something like that just because the moment is right. It’s too seductive, having the moment be perfect. I would worry that I said it just because it seemed like the right time. The stars keep falling.

“It makes me nervous,” I tell him. One after another after another, the streaks of light appear and vanish. “It goes on forever.”

I sound stupid. Chunks of burning rock from God knows where, raining down on us. Rocks that are older than our whole solar system. And when our sun explodes and we are all destroyed, we’ll be rocks and chunks of I’m not sure what, and maybe we’ll rain down on somewhere else.

On the ride home, we keep making wide slow turns from one side of the road to the other in the dark. We talk about Halloween, which is soon. I say maybe tomorrow night we should go climbing trees in the neighbourhoods we grew up in, and Clay says maybe we could learn how to fight with our bare hands. Everyone should be able to kill a man with just their thumb. We could be ready for anything. There are whole martial arts devoted to disarming someone, disabling them, and getting away, Clay tells me. He knows just what I want to hear.

My lips are raw and they taste a bit like blood and dirt, and this is nice.

Chapter 2

I try not to look at myself in the mirror. I brush my teeth, spit in the sink, and wipe my face. No need for a mirror. Clay goes in to brush his teeth, and he kisses me on the cheek as we pass. He trails his hand over my stomach. The telephone is ringing and it’s probably my mother. Nobody else calls at this hour.

“Arthur, did you know a witch becomes more powerful when she goes through menopause?” she says.

“Good morning, Mom. I’m just getting ready for work.”

“There are two times in a woman’s life when she has this huge surge of power. Puberty and menopause,” my mother says.

“Is that your mother?” Clay calls from the other room.

“Clay says hi,” I tell her.

“Tell her I say hi,” Clay says. He comes into the kitchen, already wearing his uniform. I don’t put my uniform on until I get to work. I don’t like leaving the house in it, even though nobody will see me.

“She says hi back,” I tell him.

“Tell him I say hi back,” my mother says. “The crows around here have been sitting in the tree outside my bathroom. They’ve been keeping me company. They must have heard that you weren’t going to be coming for Christmas. They must have realized that you’d be leaving your own mother alone for the holidays.”

“We are coming for Christmas,” I tell her.

“One week is not Christmas.”

“Tell her I got to handcuff somebody!” Clay says. He takes the phone from me. “I got to handcuff someone!” he says. “It was my first time. A big drunk guy too. He had a little fold-out nail file that he was waving at the blackjack dealer like a knife. I got to fill out a police report and everything.”

I pour myself a glass of juice and listen to Clay tell my mother the story. I know that my mother sounds just as excited on the other end of the phone. They could talk for hours, if you let them.

I should just tell him, I love you. I should just say it, matter-of-factly. I point at the clock, and Clay holds up his finger. One second.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay. Okay, I’ll talk to you soon.” He hands me the phone.

“I don’t like these mountains, Arthur.”

“You have a beautiful view, Mom. That’s why you got that apartment in the first place,” I tell her. “I have to go. I love you.”

“I love you too,” she says. “Call me later, I’ll tell you about my new friend. I knew those dance classes were a good idea. Clay was right. It’s about time too. I was starting to forget that they even made cocks that weren’t silicone.”

“I have to go, Mom.”

At work, I change into my uniform and pass Wallace on the stairs up to the floor. I keep my face deadly serious, until we are right beside one another, and then I wink. He stops.

“Arthur, listen,” he says. “I know you’re just joking around, but people might start getting the wrong idea. We used to have a guy here who made jokes like that, and we joked for a while before I found out that he was actually homosexual.” Wallace lowers his voice for this last part.

“Oh, I didn’t mean to give anyone the wrong idea,” I say, and Wallace looks relieved. “I really do like to have sex with men. I thought you did too.” This last part is too much. I know it even as I’m saying it. The expression on his face changes to startled and then angry almost immediately, and before I can backtrack or laugh it off, Wallace has shoved me. It takes me off guard, and I try to grab the railing of the stairs. He’s got a disgusted look on his face and then my head cracks against a step.

Wallace doesn’t say anything as I pull myself up with the railing. He looks horrified now. Especially when I put my hand to my head, and it comes away with blood.

“Oh fuck, are you okay?” Wallace says, but I’m already on my feet and pushing past him to the bathroom. I close the door. Lock it. There’s a bit of blood on my hand, but it’s just a scrape. I don’t know what to do with myself. There’s a garbage can there, and I kick it as hard as I can. The side caves in and then pops right back to its shape. I put my hand to my head again, and there’s nothing. No more blood. I’m fine. What am I supposed to do? Why is there no other door in here? I keep thinking, this is getting out of hand. But it already is out of hand, isn’t it?

When I finally come out of the bathroom, Wallace still looks terrified.

“I didn’t mean to do that,” he says, and his voice is quiet, like it was when he said the word homosexual. “I think you’re a good guy, Arthur. You know I didn’t mean to do that, don’t you? I overreacted, that’s all.” I just stand there in the hall, looking at him. Shelly comes out of the break room and walks between us. Wallace smiles at her like nothing’s wrong. “Morning, Shelly,” he says. And when she’s gone, he says, “I love this job. I know you think this company is stupid and shitty, but I’m good at this. I’m thirty-five years old, and this is the first job I’ve had where I wake up in the morning and feel good about what I do. I sell computers, and I’m good at it. They made me manager. I’ve never been a manager before. I love this job.”

I can see that. And I know that he’s just trying to save his ass. He pushed me down the stairs, and now he’s worried that I’ll rat him out, that he’ll lose his job. But he does always seems happy to be here. He’s always cheerful, always smiling, even when he’s dealing with an angry customer. He’s always got a joke. He loves this job, he really does, and I don’t know what to do. I’m sore and angry, but I’m not seriously hurt.

If I report him, he’ll get fired. And I guess that’ll make me feel better, except I know that he’ll start to actually hate gays then. You take away the one thing that makes somebody happy, and you’re the bad guy. It doesn’t matter if he deserves it. Nobody believes they deserve it. I report Wallace, and Wallace has his life ruined by a gay.

And if I don’t report him? Look at how terrified he is. His face is practically white. I’m surprised his teeth aren’t chattering. He’s not a bad guy. I don’t know him very well, but I can’t bring myself to see him as evil, just stupid. He’s stupid and he pushed me down the stairs and threw away his whole career. This office-supply store is his career and he pushed it down the stairs, and my head is sore and I’m angry and he’s put me in this fucking situation where I want to let him off the hook. Where I want to save him from himself.

“I won’t say anything,” I tell him, and he looks so relieved that I half expect him to hug me. “I’m going home for the day though. I have a headache.”

He starts nodding even before I finish my sentence.

“Of course, of course,” he says. “Thanks, Arthur.” He holds his hand out for me to shake, and it takes me off guard. I shake his hand and immediately regret it. “Take the day off,” he says.

Halfway across the parking lot, I realize that I left my regular clothes back in my locker, but there’s no way I’m going back. I don’t even know if I’m angry anymore. I don’t know whether this is my own fault for goading him. I can’t tell what I’m feeling. There are tears on my cheek, and my hands are in fists, and I want to kick in every window along this street. I’m supposed to meet Clay for lunch, then point out Wallace so he can make a pass at him, but instead I get on a bus and I go home.

At home I take off my uniform and I put it in the garbage. I sit down in front of the television in my underwear. The Muppet Show always makes me feel better. It’s hard to hold on to real-world problems when you’re watching something so fantastic.

You can tell a lot about a person based on their favourite Muppet, I think. Clay likes Animal. He likes how wild Animal is. Thrashing at the drums. Chained to the wall, but always pulling against those chains. Always rocking as hard as possible. I think that’s what Clay wants to be, and that’s more interesting than who someone is, sometimes. Nothing can calm Animal’s simple enthusiasm for bashing his drums.

My favourite Muppet is Gonzo. I love how crazy he looks, first of all, especially in the first season of the show. He’s all purple and blue, with that long nose curved downward. I love how completely he devotes himself to his useless, insane performances. He’s like Animal that way. He loves what he does, no matter how completely weird and baffling it is. Plus he looks like he’s made out of garbage and he dates chickens! So. There’s that.

So yeah, Gonzo is my favourite. No contest. Like all the best Muppets, there’s a sadness to him, but he’s not particularly sad himself. He’s plucky! He’s optimistic and enthusiastic. The sadness comes from an underlying sense of longing. Once in a while, that longing comes to the surface.

There’s a scene in a later season where Gonzo is leaving The Muppet Show for a career in Bollywood, and he’s up onstage singing that Frank Sinatra song “My Way.” He breaks down crying at the end, with his back to the audience, and Kermit comes out and asks him what’s wrong. And Gonzo says he’s upset about leaving. So Kermit tells him, “But this is your dream! This is what you always wanted!” and Gonzo says, “I want to go there. I just don’t want to leave here.”

Fuck, that kills me. I want to go there. I just don’t want to leave here. It comes in the middle of the show, out of nowhere. That’s where the sketch ends too. Kermit turns to the audience and says something like, “I guess we’d better leave him alone.” And then on with the variety show. The singing vegetables. The dancing cheese!

By the time Clay gets home, I’m smiling and cooking dinner, singing. I haven’t forgotten about Wallace, or today, but I don’t need to think about them right now either. I feel good about having thrown my uniform in the garbage. I don’t ever have to go back. Tomorrow morning I’ll wake up and start looking for a new job. I’ll wake Clay up early; maybe I’ll feel more like having morning sex. It’ll be good. I feel optimistic. I cook dinner for the two of us, and afterward I pull Clay into the shower with me.

I reach down for his cock, and he shoves me up against the wall to kiss me. I didn’t see it coming. He’s done this a thousand times. It’s sexy. I like being pushed around by him. But when he shoves me today, it startles me too much. My shoulders hit the tile wall, and Clay is coming in for a kiss, and my eyes must have gone wild, because he stops and pulls back.

“Are you okay?” he says.

Chapter 3

In the morning, Clay gets dressed and I stay in bed.

“So this is how it’s going to be, huh?” he says. “You’re just going to sit around the house in pyjamas all day? Watching TV and playing that video game? You know, you could dress up like a lady elf in real life if you wanted. I wouldn’t mind.” He pulls his pants on.

“Slower,” I say. “You’re dressing too quickly. Give me a show. I’ve been hate-crimed, you know. I need to be cheered up.” He doesn’t smile at the joke.

“You can still change your mind,” Clay says. “I can go in there on my lunch and break his nose.”

“Go to work,” I tell him. The phone’s ringing.

“You going to tell her?” he says.

I pick up the phone and make myself smile. My mother always knows whether I’m smiling or not. She can hear it in my voice, she says.

“Good morning,” I say.

“What’s wrong, Arthur?”

Less than an hour after telling my mother about quitting, my brother Ed is on the phone, promising to get me a job working with him as a patient attendant.

It sounds depressing to sit with sick people all day, but at least it sounds like a real job. It pays a decent wage, and maybe what I’ll do there will matter. Well, maybe not. At least I don’t have to start job hunting. I hate job hunting. It’s like being locked in a concrete room with no doors. The only way out is to bang your head on the wall, chipping away at it until you break through to the other side. When you do get to the other side, it’s another little room with a table, and there’s an interviewer sitting there, and he wants to ask you the stupidest questions you’ve ever heard.

“Now, what would you say is your worst quality?” he asks. This is a trick question. They want to hear some other good quality of yours, all wrapped up as a negative quality that isn’t actually very negative. The interviewer is asking trick questions, and you’re supposed to give trick answers. It’s like being in an old spy movie. You aren’t really supposed to tell them your worst quality.

“I’m a registered sex offender.”

No.

Everyone complains that the only way you can get a job these days is if you know someone. Well, I know my brother Ed. He has a job he likes, and he’s been working there for three years already.

“I’ve already talked to them,” he tells me. He’s called to put in a good word for me, and he insists that it is pretty much a sure thing. My big worry is that it might be too depressing. I get weirded out when a character in a movie has Alzheimer’s or loses their mind somehow. I’m no good at dealing with people in the twilight of life.

But if my younger brother could sit with the infirm and the dying for three years, I figured I could at least last the fall. It’d give me an income while I looked for better work. I’m twenty-eight; I have a university degree. Maybe it’s time I got a real job. I can work at night with Ed, and job hunt during the day.

“Well, I’ll call you when I know the details,” Ed says. “And, Arthur, are you doing okay?”

“Yeah, you?” I say.

“Mom told me about the guy at work. Do you want me to go down there?”

“No, no. I’ve got it,” I tell him. “I can handle it myself.”

“Okay,” Ed says. “You know I love you, right?” And we say goodbye and hang up. But, of course, I’m not handling it at all. I just walked away. Maybe that is handling it. Maybe I should make a joke out of this too. Like the faggot comment. Poor old Wally got so spooked by the homo at work that he pushed him down the stairs! Aww!

But I’m not going to sit around thinking about Wallace all day. Instead, I prove Clay right, and I dress up like a lady elf on the computer. Why not? Elves get a bonus for dexterity, which is the most important stat for a rogue. Obviously. And what does it matter whether I’m a boy or a girl? Dungeons and Dragons doesn’t have an option for “somewhere in the middle.” Anyway, I like to be pretty.

I also like the mechanics of role-playing games. I like the structure of building a character more than I like pretending to be that person. If I put points into my dexterity, that’ll pay off down the road, when my character gets the weapon-finesse feat. She’ll be able to use her dexterity for calculating damage, rather than her strength. I play the beginnings of these games over and over, starting new characters, trying new things. It’s satisfying. I don’t know why exactly.

Then I meet Clay for lunch. He looks as good as ever in his uniform. And he didn’t shave this morning, so he’s got a bit of stubble. Part of me wishes that I were perfect. That I never broke down. That I could handle things on my own. But if I hadn’t broken down in the shower last night, maybe I wouldn’t feel this close to him right now.

We go down to the food court, because he hasn’t got enough time for a real restaurant, and we get pizza. I tell him about the job. Already I’m set to be gainfully employed.

“I don’t know if you’re suited to that particular kind of work,” Clay says. “I was thinking about it, and I can probably get you a job with our security company. Even if it’s just temporary.”

“If Ed can do it, I can do it. Easy,” I tell him, and Clay shakes his head.

“Arthur, I don’t know how to tell you this, but your brother is kind of a cold-hearted bastard sometimes. I mean, I like him, you know I like him, but he’s an asshole. He has some —” he pauses, trying to think of the right wording “— emotional defences that you don’t.”

“It won’t be a problem,” I say. If it were so bad, would Ed have stayed for three years?

“Sometimes this job is like being in a movie,” Ed tells me later. He’s smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee. “You would never believe that this shit happens in real life.” He stirs his coffee and takes another sip. “All they tell you about these patients is that they’re ‘confused.’”

This is how it works. The hospital calls the care company and they say, “We need someone to watch Jeff Grantham from the 18th of June until the 29th. He’s confused.” That’s how they describe everyone — “confused.” The care company is supposed to ask for more details, but they never do. They write down “confused” on the computer, and they hang up.

Then they assign someone to care for that person. For instance, last week they called Ed at nine in the morning and woke him up. “You’re with Jeff Grantham tonight. He’s on the seventh floor of the QEII, room 709.”

“What’s wrong with him?” Ed asked.

“He’s confused.”

When Ed arrived at the hospital, Mr. Grantham was sleeping. The blankets were all in place, so my brother sat down and played his video game. After twenty minutes though, the guy woke up with a holler and threw his blankets on the floor. He was wearing a diaper and he was missing a leg.

“What the fuck?” he yelled. “Who the fuck are you?” He scrambled to the edge of the bed and sat there on one knee and one stub, looking down at the floor.

“You’re in the hospital,” my brother explained calmly. “You’re on medication that is making you feel confused. Everything’s fine. You’re safe. You’re in the hospital.” He spoke quietly and easily until the patient’s eyes began to droop, and the man finally calmed down and fell back asleep. Ed covered him with the blanket again and sat down to keep playing.

Half an hour later, the man was up again.

“Where’s my fucking leg?” he said, throwing the blankets on the floor and looking at his stump in horror.

My brother remained calm. You have to be calm when you’re talking to them, he tells me. If you get upset, it will only upset them even more. So when the man demanded to know where his leg was, my brother kept his voice perfectly level.

“I took it,” Ed said. “While you were sleeping. And if you don’t lie back down,” my brother explained, “I will have to take your other one.”

In the end, they had to strap the man into a wheelchair because he was so upset. He sat there all night, glaring at my brother and tearing at his cotton diaper. Ed wheeled him into the TV room and made him watch Deep Space Nine until the drugs kicked in and the guy fell asleep again.

Ed laughs when he tells me the story. He laughs when he’s describing the man raving and gnashing his teeth, pulling at the diaper, coating his fingers in his own shit and then licking them. My brother just launches into these stories. He loves them. He loves to tell the leg-stealing story to our mother, especially at the dinner table.

“People with Alzheimer’s all sound exactly the same,” Ed says. “It’s like they all get together and practise. They just lie there, tits up, saying, ‘Billy? Billy? Billy?’” He pauses and changes the tone from questioning to panicked. “’Billy. Billy. John? Billy? JENNY? JENNY? Billy.’”

The book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets opens with two seasoned homicide detectives arriving at the scene of a murder. They find a man with a gunshot wound in the side of his head. There’s blood all over the ground. It’s everywhere. The lead detective bends down to examine him.

“Here’s the problem. He’s got a slow leak,” the detective says, and they laugh a bit too hard.

These are regular people who have to deal with death each and every day, and so they make it a joke. Ed would have made a good cop. I remember when we all still lived on the east coast, how he would sit at the dinner table across from my mother, pretending to lick shit off his fingers while she looked horrified. Maybe he laughed too hard too? I don’t know. That’s just the way he laughs.

But yeah, it’s possible that Ed has a thicker skin than I do. I’m not the toughest cookie in the shed. I know that. But I’m gonna try. It isn’t tough to do something when you know you can handle it. It’s tough to go ahead and do that thing when you know that you probably can’t handle it.

I think.

The phone rings later that afternoon, and the caller ID says it’s the office-supply store. I don’t know if it’s Wallace or one of the other managers, calling to ask why I haven’t come in yet. I’m supposed to be starting at five. It doesn’t matter either way.

“Hello, Arthur here,” I say into the phone, cheerfully.

“Arthur, this is Donna. I have you scheduled for work today.” She sounds annoyed. “You were supposed to be here two hours ago.” Wallace would be working today too. He normally made these calls, but today it was Donna. He couldn’t even call me himself.

“Oh, I meant to call,” I say. “I’m sorry, I must have forgotten.”

“You’re sick?”

“No, I just don’t like working there anymore.”

“You know that you’re required to give two weeks’ notice before quitting, don’t you?” she says.

“Well, I’m not really required to, am I? I mean, I’m not going to get thrown in prison for not giving you notice. You probably just won’t give me a good reference. And, to be honest, Donna, I like to think that any decent job will view a good reference from an office-supply store as being about equal to no reference at all. So, anyway, The Muppet Show is coming on soon. I should let you get back to work. Wait. Donna?”

“Yes?” Donna says.

“Did Wallace come to work today?”

“Yes, Arthur. Some people actually care about their responsibilities.”

Chapter 4

My first night at my new job starts quietly. I’ve got hospital scrubs on. I bought them at the mall, which I didn’t know you could do, until Ed told me. I thought there was a special store somewhere, all stocked with scrubs and white sneakers.

I didn’t know what to expect, after hearing Ed’s stories. But it’s been quiet. I brought a book, and so I read a bit in the light from the hallway and try not to doze off. My patient sleeps. I don’t even know what he looks like. There’s a tuft of white hair sticking up from the blankets.

I’m reading Calvin and Hobbes. Comic after comic of tormenting the babysitter and making sandwiches out of dead bugs. And then suddenly there’s one that opens with a careful line drawing of a dead bird.

Nature is ruthless and existence is fragile, Calvin says. But in order to go on with our daily lives, we can’t let ourselves think about that. (He’s telling all this to his stuffed tiger, of course.) Maybe this is why everybody takes the world for granted and acts so thoughtlessly, he says.

And then, FWOOOM! Back to spaceships and adventure! And now it’s time to mouth off to a bully, and to get rid of slimy girls. It’s time to vote for a new dad. It’s time to put on a purple costume and fight evil, instead of doing homework. Forget homework, I’m a man of action!

I almost brought Anna Karenina instead, and I think I made the correct decision. I’ll take this over fifteen pages about the sound of wheat in a field. (The sound of wheat in a field? Seriously?) Comic books are fun. They’re exciting and silly, and they can be about important things when they want to be.

So I read. And after a few hours, my patient sits up and pushes his blankets down to his feet. Then he sits in silence, staring at me. He stares at me for a minute, then he looks down at his feet, then back at me. I close my book.

“You want some help?” I say. I help him into his dark grey slippers, one foot and then the other. I take his arm in mine and lead him to the bathroom. It’s more like carrying him actually. He rests all his weight on me. But when we get there, he doesn’t want me to help him inside. He pulls his arm away angrily and gives me a dirty look. Like I’ve crossed the line, trying to follow him in. I don’t know whether he needs help using the bathroom or not. All they told me is that he’s confused.

“Sorry,” I say.

He wobbles a little, but gets his balance. Then he shuffles into the bathroom on his own. I close the door behind him. I don’t want to end up like that. I don’t want to die, and I don’t want to get old either. I don’t want to lose control of my own body, my own mind. Still, I like who I am now much better than who I was at twenty-one. That’s not my age though, is it? It’s experience. If I had been twenty-one for seven years, maybe I would have calmed down anyway.

The patient hasn’t made a sound in a while. “You doing okay in there?” He bangs on the wall, so I open the door a crack. “Do you need help?” I say through the door without looking. He bangs again. I go in.

He’s sitting on the toilet with his pants still on, and he won’t look at me. I take him under the arms and lift him to his feet. At first I’m worried that he’s forgotten to take his pants off and gone to the bathroom anyways, but there’s no smell. He forgot to take his pants off and sat down, but he knew that something wasn’t right. He knew that he couldn’t go with his pants on, even if he didn’t know what to do about it.

I start trying to help him pull his pants down and he slaps my hand away and glares. He steadies himself on the wall and starts shuffling back toward the bed. Only he doesn’t go back to bed. He changes course and heads into the hallway.

We walk to the nurses’ station, him shuffling ahead and me trailing behind. Once there, he stops and smiles at me. That’s unexpected, but I smile back. We got off on the wrong foot, I think. He must know that I’m only trying to help. It’s a few seconds before I realize there are dark streaks on his pant leg and urine running to the floor.

What am I supposed to do now? I can’t stop him. How do you stop someone from peeing once they’ve started? I want him to know that I understand he is a human being, not a child, but I also need him to stop peeing on the floor.

“No, you can’t do that here,” I say, but he just keeps smiling. So I start yelling for the nurses. Urine has soaked through his pyjamas and now he’s trailing it all over the nurses’ station. He sits in each of the chairs, smiling and muttering the whole time. Still no nurses. I yell again, and he smiles wider at me. I can’t tell if he’s spreading his piss around on purpose or not. Maybe he’s just lost in some imaginary world.

The nurses are not pleased.

“Why didn’t you stop him?” the tall one asks.

I have no idea how she thinks I could have stopped him. I guess I could have guided him back to the bathroom, but I didn’t know he was going to piss everywhere. This is their fault. When I arrived, they said, “This is George. George is confused.” What they should have said was “This is George. George is confused about where to urinate.”

In Peanuts, you see strip after strip where it’s joke, joke, joke, and then there’s a comic where Charlie Brown is in his sandbox, building a sandcastle. A girl comes along and kicks it down, and Charlie Brown just sits there. Then he goes inside. At home, he takes off his clothes. He climbs into bed and just lies there looking sad. Then, next comic. Snoopy is a World War One flying ace! Linus loves his blanket!

One of the last Sunday Peanuts strips is Peppermint Patty playing football. She yells at Chuck, hey great game, right? Is he having as much fun as she is? It’s still his ball. What’s he going to do? Chuck? And then here comes Marcie to tell her everyone’s gone home. Patty should go home too. It’s dark. And Peppermint Patty asks her if they had fun.

Yes, they had fun, Marcie says. And then she leaves Patty there in the rain.

The last panel is Patty, standing alone. And to the empty field she points out that nobody shook hands and said, “Good game.”

I love those dark moments in Peanuts. I love that they’re in there, that Charles Schulz put the sad, lonely bits of himself into the comic. I love the silliness too: the dancing Snoopy strips; the little boy Rerun drawing “basement” comics about Tarzan fighting Daffy Duck in a helicopter. Those are the bits that keep me reading. The funny parts! The fun parts. The silly bits that don’t make sense. And when I get to the sad, lonely Peppermint Patty standing in a field wondering why nobody shook hands and said, Good game, well, it works because that’s not all she was. I try to think that way about everything. That’s the kind of person I want to be.

The nurses clean up George and give him something. I don’t know what. He sleeps for the rest of the night. In the morning, there’s a girl here to take over. She smiles, and I stand up to let her have the seat.

“How was he?” she says.

“Good,” I say. “Good, yeah. He slept all night.”

Clay picks me up downstairs, looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. He leans over to the passenger seat and kisses me. I haven’t brushed my teeth. I probably smell like hospitals and hand sanitizer. If he notices, he doesn’t show it.

“Let’s go to that cupcake place at the mall for breakfast,” he says. “We’ll get you all stuffed full of chocolate icing and then put you to bed.”

“Okay, sure,” I say, and he pulls out into morning traffic.

“I talked to my manager, about maybe hiring you as a security guard. She said we don’t have any openings at the casino, but maybe she could set you up an interview with the company. Nothing’s set in stone, but just in case you change your mind, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to ask.”

In the food court, Clay and I eat cupcakes. Life is good. Cupcakes for breakfast! Being a security guard might not be so bad. There would probably be training. They’d train me to be a badass. I could use a bit of that in my life, I think.

“I had drinks with Sam last night,” Clay says. Sam’s the girl from the DVD place. The one with her hair cropped short like a lesbian, but who was straight enough to ask for Clay’s phone number. The girl who, before ever talking to him once on the phone, sent him a message that said, “I want to bend you over a straight-back chair.” You have to admire a classic sensibility like that.

“And?” I say. “Did she bend you over a straight-back chair? Details!”

He tells me about the date, about the small talk. He laughs again at the jokes he told, and when he starts getting to the good stuff, we get up and head to the gentlemen’s room. He continues his story more quietly, his mouth against my ear, pressing me back against the wall, gently but firmly. He unbuckles my belt.

“We fucked in the alley behind the library,” he says. “We had two drinks at the restaurant and decided that we didn’t need dinner. She told me she wanted to fuck me. To climb on top of me and take me inside her. She said this so casually, and took another sip of her beer. ‘And then,’ she says, ‘after you’ve fucked me, I want to tie you up.’”

Clay has my cock out now. He lets go of me so he can lick his fingers, and then wraps his hand around me again.

“When we found the spot behind the library, I told her I’d let her,” he says. “I’d let her do whatever she wanted. She can tie the knots too tight, so I can’t get out. I’d let her do anything.” He’s stroking me while he whispers. His other hand is lower, first just brushing my balls, then squeezing them. Now pushing against my asshole while he strokes me.

“Anything?” I say.

“And while I’m pushing inside her, she says she’ll do whatever she wants. ‘When I tie you,’ she says, ‘I’ll tie you tight. And then there’ll be a man in the room with us. A stranger. He takes you by the hair and shoves his cock into your mouth while I watch,’ she says. I have her shirt pulled up so I can touch her breasts. So I can see them while I slide in and out of her. I have my hand around behind her, my fingers pushing at her asshole.” Here Clay pushes more aggressively into my ass with his fingers.

“Up against the wall,” I say. I’m bucking a little under Clay’s touch now. I don’t want to come on his uniform, but I do want to come on his uniform, if you know what I mean. I can picture him fucking her, her back to the wall, the brick scratching, his cock hard and pushing inside her. I want him to tell me how he turned her around, fucked her in the ass.

“Up against the wall,” Clay says. “She tells me how the stranger fucks me in the mouth, and how there are tears in my eyes. There’s spit on my lips. He has my hair in a fist, holding me down on his cock. And then he comes down my throat. I get startled and I jerk back, so the next spurt goes on my face, and on my hair. It’s thick across my lips and neck, and he leaves me there on the floor, tied up, cock hard, come on my face and in my mouth. For someone else to find.”

“Slower,” I whisper, and Clay slows his hand down. I can feel his cock through the front of his pants, but when I start to fumble at his belt he pushes my hand away.

“I have my finger inside her, and I’m fucking her hard and fast now. There’s no rhythm anymore. I fuck as fast and hard as I can, until I’m too tired, then I slow down. Then I speed up again. I know I’m going to come,” he says. “She’s not smiling. Her eyes are intense. She tells me another man comes in and stands above me while I’m tied up. He’s just there to just jerk off on me, she says. While I’m tied down. He gets down on his knees in front of me, puts the head of his cock right against my lips and jerks off hard and fast, so his fist hits me again and again in the face. I try to turn away, but he’s straddling my face, so I can’t. And then there’s someone behind me that I can’t see. Someone else in the room with us, spitting on my ass, pushing a finger into me. I can’t turn around. I can’t turn away from the cock being jerked off against my clamped-shut mouth. He pushes his . . .” But Clay has to stop his story, because I’m coming into his hand.

“Oh fuck,” I say, smiling.

Clay pulls some toilet paper off the roll and wipes himself clean.

“You like that, eh?” he says. He pulls me close to him, with my pants still around my thighs, and he kisses me hard. I feel like I might fall over. Christ, he’s hot.

On our way out of the bathroom, I notice that that under his uniform sweater, there’s a T-shirt tag sticking out. He’s been walking around all day with his T-shirt on inside out. And he’s mine.

Chapter 5

“Get another patient,” Ed says. We’re playing video games in his basement apartment. The curtains are drawn and we’re sitting in front of the TV on the floor like kids. I have to be at work in a half-hour. It’s too late to cancel my shift.

“They didn’t say he was violent or anything,” I say.

Ed shrugs.

“They never say anything,” he says. “You can’t get out of it?” I shake my head. “Well, okay. Don’t get between him and the door. Don’t stand too close to him. Don’t follow too close. Don’t meet his eyes or stare. If he picks up something heavy, get away from him.” He pauses the game and looks at me. “They gave you him because you’re new, Arthur. No one else will take him.”

“Oh.”

“But,” Ed says, smiling, “if he kills you, don’t worry. I will avenge you!”

When I get there, the mental ward is just like the rest of the hospital. There’re no plaintive howls coming from behind any doors. There aren’t any restraints on the bed. Nobody is raving. It’s just me and a three-hundred-pound man named Dave.

Brain damage put him here. His truck flipped over, and now this is Dave. He laughs a lot, but not with me. He doesn’t even acknowledge that I’m around, unless it’s to glare at me. But he gets happy whenever he sees a nurse. Gleeful.

“Hello!” he says when he sees a nurse. “Hello!”

“Hi, Dave,” the nurse says. “Are you going for a walk?”

“Yep!” he laughs. “Yep!” He likes to touch their arms when he’s talking to them. He reaches out to touch their shoulders, and he leans close to their faces. “Hello!” he says. “Hello! A cookie?”

When he smiles like that, I get a sick feeling in my stomach, like he might hurt them and there would be nothing I could do. I wouldn’t be able to stop a man that large. But the nurses just laugh and give him his cookie from behind their station and pat him on the arm.

He stops all the female patients in the hall. There’s a thin woman with grey hair and glasses who stands staring at the locked door all night. She just stands there — perfectly still except for her eyes. Her eyes follow you, back and forth, every time you near the door. She’s like one of those paintings in a haunted house: a shrivelled old widow holding a candle that flickers in the wind. You can feel her watching.

Every time Dave sees her, he grabs her by the arm and pulls her close.

“Hello!” he says excitedly. “Hello!”

And Dave’s married. There’s a Post-It note on the wall over his phone with his wife’s number on it. In case he wants to talk to her. The phone rings at 2 a.m. and the man you loved is there in your ear, laughing and incoherent. That’s what being haunted would be like, I think. Your husband is gone. You wake up to the phone in the middle of the night, and before your head is clear, you’re talking to him. It’s only after a minute that you’re awake enough to realize what’s going on. You try again and again to talk to him, to touch some part of the man you loved, but all you get is, “Yep!”

When my first break comes, I go downstairs, out the front door into the fresh air, and I call Clay. He sounds wide awake when he answers, but I don’t ask him why he’s up.

“I love you,” I tell him. “I love you. I wanted to tell you that I loved you the other night, but it seemed too perfect, which sounds stupid when I say it now. I didn’t want to just tell you because it seemed like the perfect moment. I like how excited about things you get, and I like the weird way your brain works, and I do want to learn how to knife fight with you. And judo. We can take judo lessons if you want. Karate, I don’t care.”

“I love you too,” he says. You really can hear the smile in a person’s voice over the telephone.

“I’m worried I’ll have to fight my patient,” I tell him. “It doesn’t even matter that he’s huge. I’ve only ever been in one fight in my life.”

“The greater part of valour is running like hell,” Clay says. There’s a pause, and then he says, “That guy from the other night lodged a complaint. The one who had the nail file that he was waving around like a knife. He complained that I used unnecessary force.”

“He lodged a complaint against you?”

“Because I kicked him in the back of his knee to knock him down,” Clay says. The smile’s gone.

“Is that why you’re still up? You’re worried? You didn’t do anything wrong, Clay. He had a knife!”

“He had a nail file,” he says. “I don’t know. We’ll see. They just told me about it tonight. My supervisor thinks it’ll be fine. She said not to worry about it. But I could have got those cuffs on him without kicking him. She didn’t say it, but I could have. I overreacted. I just thought it was more badass. He was hollering and waving that nail file around. When I showed up, he ripped his shirt open, tearing the buttons off, and I actually stopped in my tracks and thought, This is awesome.”

“No,” I say. “It was a crazy situation. Think about how that dealer felt. She’s just doing her job, and some guy starts threatening her? Waving a knife around? You stopped him. They’re not gonna fire you over that.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Clay says. “But I wasn’t thinking about that.” He sounds tired. “Like the other day, I would have gone down there and broken your homophobic manager’s nose. I was so angry. I just wanted to hurt him. And I probably would have, if you hadn’t stopped me. And then what? I’d have been arrested, and nothing would be solved. You’re smarter about these things than I am. You’re reasonable. You think things through.”

“I’m not reasonable — I’m a chump,” I say. “He pushed me down the stairs, and I just cried a bit in the bathroom and went home. I didn’t hit him back. I didn’t even report him. Why — because I felt sorry for him? Because I understood he made a mistake? Fuck that. I think there’s such a thing as being too understanding. People who shove me down the stairs when they find out I’m gay should probably be exempt from understanding.”

“You’re not a chump. I don’t want someone who solves problems with his fists. I want a goofball who wakes me up on Saturday mornings to watch cartoons, and then talks for half an hour about how there should be a Nobel Prize for good-natured children’s programming.”

“Well, I could go down to Switzerland and use my fists to arrange for that Nobel Prize,” I say. “I’d bring you along, but you sound like a bit of a loose cannon.” Clay laughs, and he sounds less tense now. “What if you hit the wrong Swede? We want justice, not a war!”

After we hang up I sit down on the grass, looking up at the stars. There are streetlights and parking-lot lights everywhere. I don’t want to go back inside. I want Clay to show up and drive us out to the middle of nowhere so we can watch the meteors rain down. I want to rest my head on his shoulder.

I like the way Clay gets along with my mother. It bugged me at first. I’d never had a boyfriend or girlfriend who liked to talk to my mother on the telephone. Why would you even ask to do that? But he asked one morning, and so I gave him the phone. And they talked. Not for very long, but he introduced himself, and they talked for a couple minutes. And then again, a few days later.

So I call him back, just to say, “I think you’re a good person, Clay. I don’t think you did anything wrong, but I’m glad that you’re worried about it at all, and you have a beautiful cock.”

Back at work, I watch the clock, and try to keep Dave happy. I just want this night to be over. I can’t sit with people like this every night. I don’t know how Ed does it. He makes a joke out of it, I guess. But how do you make a joke out of somebody? Dave used to know how drains worked. He could fix a toilet. I don’t even know what plumbers do, but Dave knew, and now that’s all gone. Working with Dave isn’t fun. I follow him around all night. I wish he would sleep. It’s four in the morning and all he wants to do is shadowbox. He walks from room to room and punches the air.

One of the other patients stops me in the hall to ask if I have any cigarettes. She has bags under her eyes and looks way older than her voice sounds.

“I don’t smoke,” I say. “Sorry.”

“Listen,” she says, reaching into her bathrobe. She pulls out a folded piece of paper. “I need you to call my friend for me. He’s a cop, and I just need you to tell him where I am. They won’t let me use the phone, okay? I need you to do this.” She pushes the paper into my hand, and I don’t know what to do or say. She’s looking around for a nurse, scared.

“Okay” is what I tell her, and she turns and almost runs back to her room. I know the number isn’t really the number for a cop. I know that she’s here for a reason, but I feel bad about not giving her the benefit of the doubt. I look down at the piece of paper in my hands again. When I turn around, Dave is right there in my face.

“PLAY?” he says, stepping toward me, with his fists up.

He swings at me. “PLAY? PLAY?”

I stumble backward, trying to smile at him. I’m hoping that smiling will calm him down, but he keeps coming. Is he mad that I was talking to a girl?

He falls toward me, never quite losing his balance, his fists swinging. He keeps saying, “PLAY?” over and over again. His smile is broken.

He keeps coming and I keep backing up, not wanting to turn and run. When we pass the flight-risk woman’s room, her door is open. She’s standing there staring at us.

“Look!” I say to Dave, hoping to distract him. “Look!” I point at her and it works. He turns his smile on her, and he lowers his fists.

“Hello!” he says, grabbing her. “Hello!” and she starts screaming. I’m so relieved.

When the nurses ask me what happened, I don’t tell them I threw her under the bus, sacrificed her to save myself. I tell them that he moved too fast for me. They nod sympathetically. Then they sit Dave down and explain that he can’t go into other people’s rooms.

“If you do,” the nurse says, “you won’t get the rest of your cookies for today. Okay?”

“Okay!” he laughs. “Cookies!”

The flight-risk woman is looking at me from her room. There’s a clock above her door. Three more hours. Do security guards have to deal with people like Dave? I’m pretty sure if I were a security guard at a bank, and Dave came in wearing a ski mask, swinging his arms around and yelling “Cookies! Cookies!” I would be hiding under the table with the customers. There’s no way security guards make enough money for that sort of thing.

Still, it has to be a better job than this. Dave has a big smile on his face, and I wonder if later tonight he’s going to call his wife. I can’t handle this. When my shift is over, I am going downstairs and out that front door — and then I’m throwing these scrubs in the garbage. I’ll go be a security guard.

I don’t have any badass experience, but I’m sure they’ll teach me. I’ll explain to them that I’ve only ever been in one fight in my life. In the sixth grade, I fought my friend Michael. I lost, but I probably would have stood a better chance if I had any idea what we were fighting about.

Michael and I used to pin the doors behind the gymnasium so we could sneak back into the school after it closed. This was in the last year of elementary school. Michael helped me to figure out how to pin the doors, and together we came up with the coil-notebook method of bypassing locks.

First we tried plastic knives, which were okay on some doors, if you worked at it. You would slide the knife in and wedge open the part that clicks into the hole.

The knife didn’t work on doors with metal plates guarding the clicky part though. The wire from a coil-bound notebook was perfect. You’d push it down behind the guard plate, get hold of the bottom, and pull it tight while Michael pulled on the door. Click!

We never stole anything. We did it for that wonderful feeling you get when you’re somewhere you aren’t meant to be, somewhere nobody is meant to be. A school hallway after dark. It was easy to feel like we owned the place. We walked right into the girls’ washroom and there was nobody to stop us.

We pulled the wire out of coil-bound notebooks and slipped the latch to the library, to the janitor’s closet, to the gym office. We couldn’t go into the main buildings, because of the motion sensors, but the hallways around the gymnasium were ours, as were any doorways leading off them.

We tried to beat the motion sensors, but it was impossible. During school hours we practised walking as slowly as we could in the hallways, to see if the motion sensors would make that little click that meant they’d seen you. We were trying to get good enough to sneak past them after hours, when they were armed.

We were junior hobbyist burglars, and we spent all our time together that last year in elementary. But when I showed up for school, the first day of junior high, Michael and I were suddenly different. He was wearing jeans. He’d been wearing jeans all summer, but it hadn’t occurred to me that it meant anything.

In junior high everyone wore jeans. I was the only one still in sweatpants. To be honest, I probably wouldn’t have noticed this myself, but others were quick to point it out, and Michael laughed just as loudly as any of them.

I was completely unprepared for junior high. I wasn’t expecting the scrutiny. Nothing slipped past my classmates. I had never given much thought to how I talked, but everyone had a good laugh about the way I repeated everything under my breath. I’d always done that. I did it without really thinking. I would answer a question in class, and then repeat my answer quietly to myself. I was just checking to make sure it had been okay. People laughing at me only made it worse, of course.

I was used to spending most of my time reading too. In elementary school it hadn’t been a problem. Teachers were just happy to see a student reading so much, and it hadn’t bothered my friends at all. In junior high it made me a target. I read while I walked home sometimes, which was awkward but doable. So when the school’s biggest asshole followed me one day, I did not see him coming. When he slapped the book out of my hand, I was so startled that I yelped. There were three of them and they all started laughing at me. I tried to laugh it off with a clever insult, the way the hero in the book would have.

That probably would have been okay if I had come up with a good insult — things might have gone better. I would have got beat up, but that was unavoidable. The problem was that I tried to laugh it off with a specific clever insult, an insult that the hero of my book had actually used. Word for word. Now, this was a high-fantasy novel, with trolls and wizards. So I called him a knave or a braggart or a foul wench maybe. I can’t remember the exact wording, and thank God for that. I called this junior high bully a “foul knave” and then I smiled smugly.

One day in school Michael came up to me in the hall and called me a shithead. This was after months of no communication. He had a half-dozen people all crowded around him, watching. He called me a shithead and an asshole, and I probably said nothing. He suggested we meet at three-thirty at the bus stop — to fight.

I felt all wound up and half-crazed for the rest of the day. I felt crazy right up until I met him at the bus stop and then suddenly I was just tired. We were surrounded by a huge crowd, and they were all chanting, Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! There were never usually this many people at the bus stop.

When Michael came close enough I grabbed on to him before he could punch me and I pulled him to the ground. This was the strategy I had come up with while I was sitting in class and worrying. I wanted to believe that he would have appreciated it. It was a pretty smart strategy. It was the kind of thing we might have come up with together. We rolled around in the mud, getting filthy, but nobody got any real punches in. And then the bus came.

When we stood up, I stuck my hand out to him to shake. This was something else I had come up with while sitting in class.

“Good fight,” I said, and he looked at me, confused and with pity in his eyes. Maybe it was disgust, but probably it was pity. Then he turned around and got on the bus without shaking my hand or saying anything. Everyone was patting him on the back. I sat at the front of the bus, all wet and muddy, and a girl asked me why I had stuck my hand out like that. She said it was stupid. I didn’t know what to say. It seemed like the right thing to do. I wasn’t mad at him. I didn’t even dislike him, but how could I explain that? So I said, “It was just a trick anyway. If he tried to shake it, I was going to punch him in the neck.”

Chapter 6

Clay gave me the security-force recruitment flyer last night. It said they pay above industry standards, and that they have an extensive training program for new recruits. That sounds promising. I don’t particularly want to be a security guard, but if I’m going to be one for a while, I don’t want to have to rely on my “Hug ’em ’til the bus comes” fighting strategy.

Also, is it silly to hope there are training programs that teach you to handle being pepper-sprayed? In my imagination, this training basically consists of being sprayed over and over until you’re used to it. I like the idea of being used to pepper spray, I think. It’s kind of glamorous. You’ve got one of your friends over, and she goes to get her lip balm out of her purse, and accidentally sprays you full-on with her pepper spray.

“My God, I’m so sorry,” she says, her hand going to her mouth in shock.

You give a nonchalant little chuckle.

“It’s cool, baby. I’m used to it.”

Will I learn how to tell if people are lying just from their body language? From facial micro-expressions? Will I learn to defuse a bomb while making witty banter with the sinister villain? Will they show me how to look good in sweat-stained clothes? Is this my chance to become an action hero? Does Clay already know these things? He’s pretty mysterious and dangerous-seeming. I bet he does. Are there any buddy-cop movies where the two cops make out?

There will be.

It’s all I talked about in the car.

“There’s no extensive training,” Clay said.

“You don’t think I’m tough enough? You don’t think they’ll take me aside because I match a certain psychological profile and teach me to kill?”

“I think they show you a lame marketing video and make you pay for your own uniform,” he says. “But it’s a paycheque and it’s easy work.”

But he probably just wants it to be a surprise. He wants to lower my expectations so that when they first put a machine gun in my hand, I get the proper thrill of excitement. And then we will both be dangerous and exciting. We could become vigilantes! We’ve read about violence in the news — teenage boyfriends being attacked at their proms down in Texas; lesbians having their houses vandalized in Saskatoon — and instead of feeling frustrated and helpless, like usual, we could buy plane tickets. We could each pack a small bag with just the essentials. You don’t want to take weapons through airport security. Any weapons we need will have to be attained through on-site procurement.

And they had better hope the law catches up with them before our plane touches down. Prison will be a slap on the wrist compared to our unhinged, dark-as-night vengeance. I think it would be cool if we wore suits while we committed these violent acts of retribution. Not fancy suits. No, cheap suits that we won’t mind ruining. Then if we’re caught by the police, well, think how amazing we’ll look! All bloody and torn and grizzled.

Plus, suits look official. They would add an air of credibility to our campaign of blood-drenched disproportionate responses. The average citizen will take us more seriously. That’s right, ma’am, I’ve got a licence to open a twenty-four-hour ass-kicking delivery service in your neighbourhood.

While I finish the security-guard employment application, Clay is playing chess on his cellphone beside me. This is something else he’s been trying to get me to learn with him. In case we ever become criminal masterminds, he says. We don’t have to become grandmasters or anything like that. It is Clay’s thinking that we just need to get good enough for undereducated cops to think we’re geniuses when they find our half-finished chess games. “They’re criminal masterminds!” they’ll say. “They’re always one move ahead!”

I finish the application and take it up to the girl. She smiles and then looks past me at Clay. I smile. It’s all very friendly.

“The pamphlet mentions that you provide extensive training,” I say. “What exactly does that entail?”

“Well . . .” She pauses, smiles again, and launches into a pitch. This is something I was not expecting. It’s a sales pitch for the company. She tells me about their dedication to “quality training,” about the company’s “model.” The words come out with a practised ease, and it seems like she’s going to go on forever. I look over at Clay for help, but he’s still playing his game. She keeps going. The commitment to the dedication to our ultimate goal of satisfying the customer’s et cetera.

I raise a hand to interrupt and put it as plainly as I can.

“When do I get the pepper-spray training?” I say.

She laughs nervously and tells me that pepper spray isn’t a part of their training program. What about karate then? Russian Special Forces knife fighting? Nope. I look past her at the poster on the wall. Skydivers in a circle, thumbs up, hurtling toward the ground, representing integrity or quality assurance or some business ethic. I begin to get that sinking feeling. You know the one — the one you got when you discovered your dad didn’t really fight crime, he just dressed up like that for conventions sometimes.

“Is that all for today?” she wants to know.

No, it isn’t, but what should I say? Won’t you train me to fight crime, to take an ass-kicking with a smile? Won’t you show me how to cripple a man twice my size using only a ballpoint pen?

Of course they won’t.

I don’t make a scene. I don’t flip over desks or threaten any lives. Afterwards, driving home with Clay, I think maybe I should have. Maybe that would have shown them my potential. The boss would have come out from a backroom and looked around at the carnage and said, “Why is this guy getting the regular application form? Let’s get him a taser gun and schedule him a training session with Tire Iron Pat.”

After he drops me off, Clay goes to work, and I curl up on the couch to watch Die Hard. Die Hard is the greatest action movie ever made. There is no denying this fact. It is the father of all action movies. The mother. When action movies wake up in the middle of the night crying, Die Hard walks across broken glass in its bare feet to give them their bottle.

The secretary calls me when I’m in the shower; I was thinking about Clay in a bloodstained suit, his shirt ripped open, his eyes distant and angry.

“Would you be available for an interview with one of our detectives?” the secretary says. Detectives! My heart’s fluttering.

“You’re damn right I’m available,” I say. I hope I sound like I’ve been sleeping in my car wearing a dirty wife-beater for a week, stinking like whisky. Would I have been available if she hadn’t used that word, detectives, or if I hadn’t been sitting at home watching Die Hard all day, memorizing every line of Bruce Willis’s dialogue? Sure. But now I’m available and excited!

My mom calls after that.

“You weren’t home this morning,” she says.

“Clay took me out to where he works. He’s gonna get me a job as a security guard,” I tell her.

“Is he there now?” she says.

“No.”

“I think you should ask him to marry you.”

I almost drop the phone, and then I’m laughing.

“Are you kidding?”

“You two work really well together. He makes you happy, Clay. Why not put a ring on his finger?”

I think about sliding a ring onto Clay’s hand, and his smile, and I get all gooey in the heart. This is why people get married, I think. They don’t think about these things practically; they just imagine the wedding cake. The way their boyfriend would look in a tuxedo. They imagine sitting old and crotchety together on the front step, canes leaning against the wall, a chessboard between them. Two men growing old together. And their heart feels like this, and of course it seems like a good idea.

“If I get married, it’s not going to be for a long time,” I tell her. “I don’t even have a job.”

“You’re almost thirty now, Arthur.”

After that, I just sit on the couch thinking about growing older with Clay. About trying to find two wedding-cake toppers that would do us justice. Do they make Muppet wedding-cake toppers? I bet they do.

The interview is later that day. My interview with the detective. It wouldn’t be accurate to describe him without clichés. He’s a barrel of man. He has a five o’clock shadow. He likes his women like he likes his whisky. Twelve years old and mixed up with Coke. That kind of guy! He shows me his licence, which says quite clearly, “Private Investigator and Private Guard Licence.” I am in the presence of pure badassery. His shirt is untucked!

It brings a smile to my face, seeing that licence, knowing that it isn’t out of reach, knowing that someday soon I could be damaging public property in a high-speed chase through downtown. Beating down little old men with their own GOD HATES FAGS signs. I could be the one coming home stinking of booze, though I might skip the self-destructive alcoholism. I wouldn’t want to drive Clay away. But otherwise, I could be a loose cannon! A half-crazed maverick!

I smile, and the detective smiles back.

“You know, you learn a lot from this job,” he says.

I’m on the edge of my seat already, but I lean even farther forward. Is this it? Is this where the music swells, and we cut to a training montage?

“You learn how to read a person,” he says, and I’m all ears.

Training. Extensive training.

“Sure, you can get books and videos that teach you this stuff,” he says, waving his hand dismissively. He has thick fingers. A fist like a sack of oranges, if he needs it. I imagine he needs it. I want to believe that he needs it all the time. “But you’ll never make it far on theory alone,” he says. “This job will teach you how to read a person. You’ll do it every day. Your safety will depend on it.” And then he leans forward, so we’re face-to-face and I can smell the cigarettes on his breath, and he says, “You want to know what I can tell about you? Just from your body language?”

Fuck, do I ever. I can only nod, mute with awe. Can he tell that I’ve never been close with my father? Can he tell that I watch movies to live life the way it should be lived, to jump from train to train with Harrison Ford because I would never have the courage on my own? To laugh every shitty thing off and just keep shooting myself out of cannons like Gonzo? Does he know that Steve Martin is my hero, or that I cried when John Candy died?

“You’re a smart kid, for one,” he says. “You learn fast. You’re a good worker.”

He keeps talking, and as he talks my heart sinks, but my smile never fades. I keep on smiling while he feeds me line after line. He tells me everything he thinks I want to hear. This is just another part of the pitch. Why is there a pitch? Why are they pitching me this job? Shouldn’t I be trying to convince them?

I’m such an idiot. This isn’t going to be a job that will tolerate or encourage my loose-cannon idea of justice. This isn’t a job that will nurture and respect my violent yet tender-hearted individuality. This job won’t fix me, won’t give me the tools to handle myself when someone like Dave comes swinging, or when someone like Wallace shoves me.

This is how great our company is. This is how great you are. Imagine how great it would be if you wore a uniform at night and patrolled construction sites for our company! Think of the possibilities, Arthur! Think of the spiritual enlightenment!

And then he offers me the job, still leaning forward, gesturing with those thick, lying fingers.

I nod. I smile. And I say, “Thank you, yes, I would like to come to work for you.”

“Great,” he says. “Do you have time now for your training?”

Training! My heart flutters against my will. He takes me into another room.

And so this is training. There isn’t a single bottle of pepper spray to be found. Training to these people means watching instructional videos with fellow new recruit Bob. Bob has joined up for some part-time work, and he doesn’t seem like the brightest knife in the shed. I’m getting the feeling that the shed I’ve stumbled into isn’t even meant for cutlery. It’s meant to store rocks.

The material in these videos seems aimed at people trying to find work after suffering a stroke or major head trauma. Every point they make is repeated a dozen times. Stealing from employers is wrong. Yes, even if it’s just a pen. That means it is wrong to steal a pen. What about this blue pen? Yes, stealing the blue pen is wrong too. Yes, even if you’re poor, and your family needs the blue pen for Christmas dinner.

Later on we’re treated to a dozen or so different “employee testimonies” about how great it is to work with the company. Now, let’s make something clear. It’s not that I don’t believe these are really employees. It’s quite obvious they’re real employees. There is no way in hell anyone would say, “No, let’s not use real employees, let’s hire some professional actors,” and then have the actors pretend to be idiots.

But if they approached Clay to be in a video like this, I’m sure he’d say no. Maybe this is all they could get. It’s not very encouraging. My problem is that I’m not sure that my idea of a great job is the same as, say, someone with an IQ of 60. I don’t mean to say I’m better, just that we have different needs.

My dreams of spunky sidekicks and dry cool wit in the face of adversity have faded. I am not going to be an action hero; I am going to be a rent-a-cop. Maybe one day an action hero will run past me, and I will be an innocent victim in the shootout.

This is what’s left.

I wonder what Clay is wearing right now.

Chapter 7

The scheduling guy gives me a brief description of the job site. He lets me know that I will be provided with a hard hat and a flashlight.

“A big mother-fucking flashlight,” he says. Then he makes hand motions like he’s beating someone down with that Big Mother-Fucking Flashlight. For two glorious seconds his eyes bug out of his head, and his teeth gnash at the air as he tears into some make-believe crook.

He’s my new favourite co-worker.

Aside from murdering trespassers, I will be required to walk around every once in a while with my justice club and then call hourly reports in to the dispatcher. I have already begun planning ways to use this call-in procedure to keep myself entertained. Some possibilities are:

a) Fake emergencies. This includes pretending that someone is breaking into the building, which would result in an exciting light show when the police arrived, and the chance to fill out long, involved reports, using made-up characters. These could also include fake murders, insisting that wet, shadowy, half-human figures beat someone to death with makeshift tools like big rocks and then dragged the bodies into the sewers.

b) Disguising my voice differently with each call. To make this more fun, I could record my male and female friends saying things like, “This is Arthur, I’m out at the site, and everything’s fine,” and “I have a cold,” or “I don’t think it’s recording.”

c) Pushing random buttons on the phone and not talking. If I do this when I am scheduled to call in, maybe they’ll panic. They’ll send someone out to save me, imagining that I’m lying in a bloody mess, too weak to talk, using the last of my strength to call my employers and let them know I’m taking a break. When they show up, hopefully with the police, I will say the phone is probably busted. To be on the safe side, I may bust the phone.

I’m not really like a cop at all. I haven’t got any actual authority. If someone does show up to do anything bad, I am not allowed to touch them or interfere with them in any way. I’m a scarecrow. I’m like one of those plastic owls that are supposed to scare away pigeons, but that pigeons shit all over.

I could be wearing a cheap suit with Clay right now. We could be waiting in the dark outside the office-supply store, tire irons shoved down our pants, waiting for Wallace to get off work. We could be on a plane, flying to the middle of God knows where to avenge a pimply teen.

But instead I am guarding a construction site. Every hour I am required to walk around the building looking for anything out of the ordinary. As it is pitch-black, and I carry a big flashlight, I imagine that it would be pretty easy to hide from me. The only way I could possibly catch anyone is if they managed to hurt themselves while breaking in and were subsequently too injured to move.

I am ever vigilant in my quest to defend the world from clumsy criminals.

I have a co-worker across the street who is helping me adjust to the reality of being on-site (as opposed to what those idealists down at “headquarters” expect). I’m getting an education of what life is like “in the real world.” For example, “Behind the building is spooky as fuck, so don’t bother going back there. There aren’t any cameras to make sure you do your rounds, and nobody’s going to break in anyway,” he tells me.

After work, I stop at the mall, and there’s Wallace, in line for coffee. He’s not wearing his uniform, and I realize this is the first time I’ve ever seen him without it. He’s wearing a button-up shirt and jeans. Just another guy in line for a coffee.

He looks over and sees me and doesn’t smile. He doesn’t not smile either. He looks at me for a second, and then his gaze moves on like he hasn’t seen me at all. Suddenly I’m angry again. I don’t know what I thought would happen if I ran into him. I guess I would have expected the same smile or nod I would have gotten coming into work in the morning. The Wallace I had known while working there, before everything happened. No hug or anything — we aren’t ever going to be best friends — but some kind of acknowledgement. I didn’t expect this.

This is someone who shoved me down the stairs when he found out I was gay. A split-second move, and a mistake he regretted. But that regret really was just about his job. Now that his job is safe, this is how things are. This is how they would have been if he’d found out that I was gay and played it cool. He looked right through me.

I turn around and walk away. There’s a children’s store, and then a bathroom. Inside the bathroom, I kick the stall door. I kick it again and then I lean back against the wall and look at myself in the mirror. Good call, Arthur. That empathy of yours saves the day again. You think he’s gonna push another gay employee? Maybe, maybe not. But in the back of his mind he’s gonna think, Well, I could get away with it.

The bathroom door opens and a man comes in. It takes me a second to recognize him. Adam Sambro, from high school. He nods at me the way men nod at each other and walks to the urinal. He hasn’t recognized me.

I remember him in the cafeteria, telling jokes to his friends at the next table.

“What’s the best part about date rape?” he said, taking a bite of cafeteria pizza. “The sex!” And everyone laughed. “Why is it depressing when a homeless woman gets pregnant?” he said. “Now she’s dirty and fat.”

Adam Sambro, just another student-council kid. He never much stuck out to me. Except it might have been him who put a rock through the window of Mr. Payne’s car. It might have been Adam Sambro here who wrote FAGGOT on the side in spray paint. Nobody ever got caught, and nobody came forward. I don’t remember thinking it at the time, but I’m thinking it now. I’m sure I heard him laughing about it anyway. Just one more laughing voice. Everyone had thought that was funny. Fuck him. What is a person supposed to do when they come outside and find their car smashed?

Faggot.

Is this what I am?

Is this how people see me every day, when I come to work and teach physics? I’m just the faggot teacher? Is this what the repair guy at the body shop is going to think about me when I bring this in? Is this what the other teachers are going to be thinking, even while they make a show of trying to find and punish whoever did this?

When Adam Sambro finishes pissing and zips his fly, I’m ready. He turns around and I step into him. I put my hand on his shoulder, and I bring my knee up into his balls as hard as I can. He doubles over and goes down gasping for air. He’s not even looking up at me; he’s just fetal on the ground. I’m so angry. I don’t know what to say.

“Faggot” is what I say. And then I turn and leave. I’m shaking. The doors to the outside are close. And once I’m outside, the road is close. The lights are green, and across the street there’s a row of houses I can cut behind. On the next street over, I start to jog. Then I’m running a bit faster. I start running as fast as I can, and I run until I can’t run anymore. Until my face feels tight and my insides are burning, and tears are streaming down my face.

I call Clay at work and tell him what happened. He’s going to come and get me. He’s leaving work to come. I climb up onto playground equipment, and I sit with my feet hanging down. What if Adam Sambro is someone completely different now? Everybody is an asshole in high school. Fuck, what if he’s gay now? Oh fuck. What if he’s gay now and I attacked him and called him a faggot?

Even if he’s not gay, I attacked him. I attacked him in the bathroom, a place where people should feel safe. He was taking a piss and then out of nowhere he was on the floor in pain. Nobody should have to go through that. We should be allowed to be safe. There should be places where we can be safe. Is he going to be afraid to go into public bathrooms now? Is he going to be angry? Is he going to feel angry and helpless and frustrated and is he going to turn around now and attack someone else himself?

Why won’t Clay get here? I don’t like the way I feel. I need him here, putting his arms around me. Is he even going to want to put his arms around me? Is Adam Sambro still on that bathroom floor?

In Unforgiven, after the kid finally kills someone, he just cries and drinks. He tries to justify it to himself, and to Clint Eastwood.

“I . . . I guess he had it coming though, right?” he says.

“We all got it coming, kid,” Clint Eastwood says.

I don’t know which character I am. The kid, I guess.

There’s a scene in the movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles where Steve Martin has finally had enough of John Candy’s irritating habits — his snoring, his constant chattering. He snaps. He points out every obnoxious thing that’s wrong with John Candy, all the stupid things he talks about, his pointless stories. He goes on and on and on while John Candy just stands there and takes it. And when Steve Martin is done his ranting, John Candy says, “You wanna hurt me? Go right ahead if it makes you feel better.”

He says maybe Steve Martin’s right. Maybe he does talk too much, and maybe he does do the wrong thing. And you know what? Steve Martin is welcome to think whatever he wants. Because, “I like . . . I like me,” John Candy says. “And my wife likes me.”

That bit always makes me well up with tears. He doesn’t need Steve Martin to like him. He likes himself. And he has someone who loves him. Later, when you find out that his wife has been dead for years now, it just destroys me. It destroys Steve Martin too. You see a series of flashbacks, where John Candy is talking about his wife, and about his life, and it’s like Steve Martin is seeing him for the first time. When he figures it out, he goes running to find him, to bring him home to his own family for dinner. And this is when supposedly he realizes that John Candy is his friend after all, but I don’t think so. I think this is when John Candy becomes his friend. When Steve Martin sees the weakness, that’s the moment they become friends. That’s what makes relationships strong.

I can see Clay coming across the playground toward me now, and I hope I’m right.

About the Author

Joey Comeau writes the comic A Softer World. He is the author of the bestselling Overqualified (2009) and One Bloody Thing After Another (2010), which was shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Award and the ReLit Award. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Copyright © Joey Comeau, 2012

Published by ECW Press

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416-694-3348 / info@ecwpress.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Comeau, Joey, 1980–

Complete lockpick pornography / Joey Comeau.

Contents: Lockpick pornography — We all got it coming

I. Comeau, Joey, 1980– . Lockpick pornography.

II. Comeau, Joey, 1980– . We all got it coming. III. Title.

PS8605.O537C64 2012 C813’.6 C2011-906978-4

ISBN: 978-1-77090-192-6

also issued as: 978-1-77090-191-9 (PDF); 978-1-77041-069-5 (Print)

Lockpick Pornography was previously published by Loose Teeth Press in 2005.

Editor for the Press: Michael Holmes / a misFit book

Design and production: Rachel Ironstone

The publication of The Complete Lockpick Pornography has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada, and by the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. The marketing of this book was made possible with the support of the Ontario Media Development Corporation.