a missing section
I get off the streetcar. A young punk in shredded jeans and a black t-shirt, pins stuck through his earlobes, is pissing against the wall of a store. His girlfriend squats beside him, picking at her teeth with a single, black-painted nail. I walk into the Market. A young girl with thick dreds passes on a bike, the right side of her bare leg badly bruised at the knee. The sound of laughing and thudding music enters the street from the front entrance of a bar. To my right, in a small, shaded park, a group of hippies sit on the grass, smoking weed and talking quietly. One of them, shirtless, his thin chest sunk deeply around his ribs, craddles a large African drum between his knees. He looks at me, blinks heavily, turns back to his friends.
At the end of the street a group of young hipsters mill outside a bar, most of them smoking. Their voices cut into the air, loud, abrasive laughter, guys arguing. The sound of a bottle being smashed on the pavement.
I scan the crowd but Ryan isn’t in it. I walk up to a young blonde smoking by herself near the curb.
“This is the Boat yeah?” I ask. She looks at me like I’m something she coughed up. I smile at her.
“Uh, yeah,” she says.
I turn around. He’s here somewhere. The event he created on Facebook listed a graffiti project and then dancing at the Boat, so he’s either in the club already or still tagging somewhere. A little further ahead is the entrance to an alley. I walk over to it; at the far end end a small group of people stand watching a couple guys huddled next to the wall.
I walk into the alley, loose gravel and shards of glass crunching under my feet, weeds piercing the cracks in the pavement. The left wall is easily 30 feet high, solid brick painted peeling white. To the right are the backs of houses, poorly constructed wooden fences barely stopping their yards from leaking into each other. The space is dim except for a couple flashlights someone’s set on a couple crates. They shine against the wall, the backs of the artists; the one on the right is Ryan. Even with his back to me I can tell it’s him - the smooth line of his neck and the short crop of hair, the slight hunch in his shoulders that’s identical to Ryota’s.
I approach the group: two guys and two girls, plus Ryan and the other guy tagging the wall. The four of them standing look at me, but the artists don’t notice. One of the guy’s - black and rail thin - nods at me. The other, white, and bigger, doesn’t acknowledge me. He brings a bottle of Coke to his lips, swallows it, passes the bottle to the black guy, who does the same. Whatever’s in the bottle flashes clear beneath the Coke lable. Both the girls eye me.
“What’s up?” I say. The black guy shrugs.
“Hey,” says one of the girls, the less attractive one, in a small black dress, her heavy breasts puffing out the top. Her friend - prettier, slimmer, and bleach blonde, takes a cell phone out of her pocket and begins texting something.
“Sorry, just saaw these guys working down here and thought I’d come check it out.”
“You like graffiti?” asks the first girl.
“Mhmm.”
“You here for the Boat?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“They’re really good,” she says, as if it follows naturally.
“Who is?”
“Oh, them.” She nods to Ryan and his friend. The gay couple laughs, the black guy handing the white guy the bottle. Ryan works a can of black paint at the base of the wall, his friend filling in a looping coil with pink. The image is nothing I recognize; colour patterns, intersecting lines, a few loose circles. I can’t believe anyone would want to watch someone painting this, and then I notice the digital video camera set up on one of the crates, near the flashlights. The black guy sees me looking.
“We’re gonna time lapse it,” he says.
“Cool. And the restof you just like drinking in alleys.”
The bigger girl smiles, but the black guy looks at me just like the girl back at the curb did, like I’m something nasty he stepped on. He’s definitely gay - I wasn’t sure at first, but only a good looking woman or a gay man can give off looks like that.
Ryan stands up, shakes his arms out, turns to face us. He has a bandana tied around the lower half of his face. It once must have been white but it’s stained with so many coats and shades of paint that it’s nearly impossible to tell. He pulls the bandana down: his face is narrow, with high cheek-bones, wide lips. His black hair hangs in sharp points from his forehead. He’s pale; he looks exactly like Ryota bled of colour; his eyes are wider. He spits, drops his (empty) can of paint to the ground.
“Shit my knees hurt,” he says. The black guy offers him the bottle of Coke. Ryan takes it, sucking from it heavily, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Who’re you?” he says.
“No one,” I answer. “Just came down an alley.”
He shrugs, turns to the other artist.
“You almost done?”
“Almost,” he says. The black guy walks over to the video camera and turns it off.
“Let’s get out of this alley,” he says. The prettier girl has her cell at her ear, talking quietly. Her friend tries to look comfortable standing next to her. I lean against the back fence, trying to get a better look at the work they did on the opposite wall, but it’s too big to see fully. A point I put my eyes on won’t take in the whole of it. At the edge, beneath the work, is a fresh coat of white, underneath that, the outside rim of the previous mural.
“You like it?” asks Ryan.
“It’s big,” I say.
“Has to be, has to be. Anyway it’s better than the shit that was here before. More than half the work in the city is garbage. It should all be painted over.”
Something about him pisses me off.
“Maybe whoever threw that up before you wouldn’t agree.”
“I don’t care what they think,” he says, laughing.
“Come on,” says the white guy. “I wanna dance.”
“We’re all getting bored back here. And we’re attractin people off the street,” says the black guy. Ryan laughs. The other artist stands up.
“I’ll clean this up.”
“I’ll help,” says Ryan.
“Naw, it’s ok. I don’t feel like dancing.”
“You never feel like dancing.”
“Come on,” says the pretty girl. She puts her phone away in her purse.
“Yeah,” says the heavy girl. She glances at me, and it’s like she’s asking me to come too; it isn’t flattering - she’s probably just tired of hanging out with a bunch of gays. They start filing out of the alley. The second artist switches off the flashlights, starts packing them and the cans of spray paint into the milk crates. Ryan looks back at me, turns around and follows his friends. I wait for them to clear the corner and then I move to the far end othe alley.
“Can’t man,” I hear Ryan saying. “Got some stuff to take care of.”
“Come on!” says one of the girls.
“Sorry hun. Dance yer little tail off for me though, k?”
I watch him walk into view the opposite side of the street. He moves fast, pausing briefly to light up a cigarette. I round the corner and follow him.
He winds his way down the street, out of the Market, turning left on Dundas. The lights at Spadina wash the pavement, glint, yellow and red, over the hoods of passing cars.
He walks like Ryota, but softer, or maybe just more gay. He tosses the cigarette away affectedly in the middle of an intersection, pauses to let a car turn right and carries on past Spadina. After a block he turns into an alley. I turn with him; it smells of rotten fruit and drywall. On the left are piled bags of trash, the crumbling remains of a gutted building - scrap wood, electrical wiring, cracked cinderblocks, dust. Next to the pile is a dumpster overflowing with more of the same, an electrical pole supporting the weight of a circuit box, dozens of black cables. On the opposite side of the alley is a metal door next to a stack of milk crates. Ryan walks up to the door. I stop, then move around behind the electrical pole next to the dumpster.
He knocks on the door, once, hard. There’s a pause, and then it’s pushed open, just a crack. Ryan says something too low for me to hear. The door opens wider, and steps around and walks into the building. The door swings shut, and I can see the tag scralwed on it. His tag, the one from the show, and from Japan. The mnemonic.
The alley is quiet; a cat slips into view around the side of the dumpster, paws quietly at the trash. It looks at me, its eyes glinting points of light.
I wish I had a cigarette.
The door bursts open. Two guys step out - the two guys I followed here from the subway. They’re dressed almost exactly the same, in the same “uniforms” - business casual with name tags hanging at their necks.
I freeze, which is stupid, start walking which is worse - they see me instantly. The door closes behind them, and the car darts off behind the dumpster.
“Hey...” says the Middle-Eastern, grinning “Now I remember you.” He laughs.
“Shit, of all things you remember this dumb bastard?” says the black man.
“It’s a start,” he answers. To me: “Yo, what the fuck I tell you last time?”
I churn through responses, trying to land on the one that’ll get me out of here. Should I play it aggressive? Passive? Like it it didn’t happen.
“Huh?”
“You heard him,” says the black man. “Sure as shit you heard him last time. I know ‘cause he wouldn’t shut up about it.”
“Told you it wasn’t a good idea. Shoulda listened.”
“What the fuck are you guys talking about?”
I start walking and they cut me off. Behind them, the street is tantalizingly close - a couple teen girls pass on Dundas, walking bikes. Neither of them glance into the alley.
“No man, you aint leavin yet.”
“I think you got the wrong person or something.”
“Hey,” says the Middle-Eastern, to the black man. He tilts his head toward him, but keeps his eyes on me. “He doesn’t remember?” There’s a level of uncertainty in his voice that wasn’t there before.
“Maybe he does and maybe he doesn’t.”
“Yeah.”
“Shit, I don’t care if he doesn’t or not. Makes no difference to me - I remember. And I remember us tellin him not to come by no more.”
“Well,” starts the Middle-Eastern.
“What?”
“Well, I didn’t say that.”
“Huh?”
“I mean not exactly. I told him it was a bad idea but not that he shouldn’t come around again.”
“You told me you did.”
“Did I?”
“You dumb fuck. Why the hell are you telling me this now?”
This would be funny if I wasn’t scared, but I am; I realize it for the first time. When I met the researcher in Japan I’d been wary, but not scared. These guys are different, especially the Middle-Eastern; he cycles through versions of himself even faster than the researcher did, his personality shifting on a dime, from hard-ass to deferential and back. I turn around, start walking up the alley, away from the street (a mistake? But at least I’m moving.)
“Where you going?”
“Yeah man, stop a minute.”
They fall into step on either side of me. I swivel my head between them, the black man on my left, the Middle-Eastern on the right. The black man’s wide face is super-imposed over the faded, brick backs of buildings, the Middle-Eastern’s over fences, garage doors, the opening of another alley.
“My name’s...” The Middle-eastern starts, breaks off. He takes the tag hanging at his neck and reads it. “Jerry.”
“And I’m Ben.”
“Now where you headed?”
“Home.”
“Home huh?”
“That’s right.”
“You know, I think you should slow down and talk a minute.”
“We won’t keep you long.”
Ben puts his hand on my shoulder. It’s heavy and warm. I brush it off with difficulty. He puts it back, and pulls back; I skid to a halt.
“What the fuck man? Get your fuckin hand off me.”
“Don’t go takin that tone. You think it’s alright stalkin people?”
“What? Who’s stalking anyone?”
“Still don’t remember huh? You followed us back round here one day. Now, our friend Ryan tells us he had you followin him here tonight. And here you are. You think that’s right?”
“Why not?” I say, dropping the pretence that I don’t remember. It doesn’t seem like it’s working. “I did it all the time in Japan.”
“You think this is funny?” Jerry’s eyes are glazed, like plastic replicas. He licks the corner of his mouth. Ben’s hand on my shoulder has the weight of a prostethic. My stomach turns, and I run for it.
A hard shot to my foot: the pavement stands up to meet me; pain explodes at the side of my head, I taste blood. A brick hits me in the stomach, just below my lowest rib (not a brick - one of their feet, but felt like a brick); I retch, spit, curl into a ball. He kicks me again. Which one? One of them.
“This aint Japan fucker!” screams Jerry.
Lying on the ground, gasping, foreshortened pavement leading to an empty garage. The garage’s roof is made from a sheet of corrugated green plastic, the wall on the right the brick, on the left, a shitty wooden fence. At the back wall are a collection of boxes, old paint cans, and a large, wooden pagoda, complete with pedestal and an offering of fruit, a few burnt-out sticks of incense. What the fuck is that doing here? the thought is hard as the ground under my cheek.
One of them kicks me in the gut again.
“Hey, fuckin watch it!”
I look up: Ben has his arm around Jerry, holding him back (it hit me then, as hard as the kicks, as off as a pagoda in a back alley.) I spit laughter, roll onto my back.
“What’s so fuckin funny huh?” asks Jerry. He lands another kick. I groan, laughing harder, my hands cradling my stomach.
“Ben and Jerry? Are you fuckers on crack or something?”
“What?”
“You guys are fuckin ice cream!”
“What?” He says it again, his voice cracking. He seems to slump into himself, Ben’s grip on his shoulders loosening. He suddenly looks confused, like a lost child. “You sayin that aint my name? It’s written right HERE man.” He takes his tag and holds it up at me. “It SAYS so.”
“Oh shit man, really?” I get up to my knees, spit again, a loose trail of saliva hanging from my lips. “Well then I guess it must be your name. Shit. Somebody fucked you guys up real good huh?”
“You wanna talk about fucked up? Huh?” He springs forward, aims a kick - I catch his foot in my hands, my fingers nearly breaking; a cold laser of pain slices the length of my arm; I ignore it, turn inwards, drag his leg around with me. He lets out a muffled shout as he hits the ground.
“Shit!”
I get to my feet, run, stumble, my palms scraping the ground as I catch myself. I look around, see Ben pulling Jerry to his feet, and don’t bother waiting around to watch.
I run, turn down the nearest alley, a blur of graffiti and tags on the walls around me. My foot catches on something; it clatters away, hollow and metallic - a can. It lands in the gutter running alongside a doorway.
“Hey! You fuck!” The voice echoes along the walls, mixes and dies in the ragged sound of my breath, the drumline of my feet on the pavement.
I burst out of the alley, onto the street, nearly slamming into an old, bent woman pushing a shopping cart. Light burns my eyes: headlights, all yellow, streaking, the neon hung in restaurant windows, blue fish, red characters. Inside, happy people eat at tables with gleaming plastic table cloths, waiters in cheap suits.
I want to and don’t look behind me. I can hear them, running. At least they’ve shut up now; breath burns my lungs, lights burning my eyes, signs dripping off the sides of buildings - ALL YOU CAN EAT; FACTORY PRICE; SUN MING HONG; ORIENT HARVEST - a cab’s headlights and for a second I have an insane urge to flag him down (should have - they won’t do shit in public. What are they going to do? Drag me out of the cab? They might.) The cab barrels through the yellow light and, and running, I nearly fall into the hood of a car turning right, dodge it, narrowly; the squeel of tires. Someone yelling - Ben and Jerry? The guy driving the car? I don’t wait to find out.
Run. Legs move and eyes follow; I see myself reflected in store windows, over headless mannequins, displays of imported tank tops, cuts of meat, in the glass windshields of parked cars - and it’s my face, it is mine, the same face I’ve always had - an alley opens on the right and turn into it, swallowed in the shade of towering brick walls, a stench of leftover Chinese food, baked oil. At the end of the alley, a lower brick wall, graffitti - the word SKISM sprayed there, in red - and behind that someone’s back yard. I run to the wall.
“You’re done now! Done!” The voice (Ben’s? Jerry’s?) comes from the far end of the alley; I jump, hit the brick wall, the breath ripped from my lungs, fingertips straining at the top edge, muscles screaming - I pull myself over as a hand grasps my ankle. I twist it loose and fall onto damp earth on the far side.
I lie on my back. A mud-purple sky hangs above me, framed by the roofs of buildings, the wall. Breath pours from my mouth, gasping.
I can hear them scrambling on the other side of the wall.
“Ya see that?” says Jerry.
“Mutherfucker can jump. Shit.”
“Hey Ben!” I yell. “You talk like a fuckin stereotype ya braindead fuck!”
“Muchterfuck we’re not through with you by a damn sight!”
“Fuck this guy man, Jesus Christ.”
Something flies over the wall. It hangs in the air, black and solid, blotting a cut of sky.
“Shit!”
I roll; it lands - a brick - on the ground a foot from my head. I get to my feet, stagger forward. In front of me is the back end of a house, a glass door black as a mouth in the center of a narrow wall. I move around the side of the house to a gate, fumble with the latch.
“Hey!” I turn - Jerry’s head at the wall. “You’re not goin anywhere.” He pulls himself over the edge. I leave the latch, haul myslf over the gate and drop onto a concrete landing on the far side.
My left ankle aches, and my hip, a creeping, sick sore in my side where they kicked me. I run anyway, down the street. I want to run right, get back on Spadina, into the light, the signs of life (cabs, the rattle of a streetcar, some drunk kid yelling at his friend); I turn left instead, down a quiet, residential street of dead houses and blank cars.
I cross the street. There’s a large bush ringing the lawn of one of the houses, I dive behind it, pull myself over the grass and sit down in the small garden backing the bush, swaddled in shadows. I learn forward, press my face close to the bush. The leaves are cool against my skin, feel like they’re coated in a layer of plastic. Through the gaps in the leaves, the bony twigs, I can see a section of road, the porch of a house on the opposite street.
They walk into view, dress shirts untucked, dirt stains on the front of their pants. They stop in front of the house. Jerry laughs, but Ben looks worried.
“Lost the fucker...” His voice carries across the street.
“Yo that was pretty fucked up huh?”
“Man what you go kicking him around for? We weren’t told nothin about that.”
“I just lost it man, you know, I get like that sometimes. Hey you don’t believe him do you? About our names I mean?”
“Ah man, shut the fuck up about our names alright? It doesn’t make a difference what the fuck your name is. All you gotta worry about is what we’re supposed to tell him about this.”
“We just tell him he got away.”
“Fuck,” Ben says. He starts walking away. Jerry follows him. “You must be dumber than I thought if you think he...” his voice trails off as they move out of earshot.
I breathe out, lie back into the soft earth. There’s no way any of that just happened. A pair of goons named Ben and Jerry hanging in the back alleys of Chinatown? In business casual? That has about as much chance of being real as I have of figuring it out.
I stretch myself out, crushing the flowers in the garden. A low gust of wind rustles the bush’s leaves.
“What the hell happened to you?” Her voice shook as she said it, her face twisting. She hesitated, took a step towards me. I bent down to take my shoes off, slowly, working around the pain in my side.
“May,” I start, and the lie I’d prepared died on my lips. I drew a blank - I couldn’t remember what I was going to tell her. It was the first time since I started with the drug that I’d forgotten something, and the absence of memory was another kind of pain.
“May I have no idea who you are,” I said.
“What?”
I sat down in the middle of the hallway, stared at my feet. She stood in front of me, motionless.
“I don’t remember you. Not like this, not the way you remember me. I don’t remember a relationship with you, or you ever being in Japan. It’s all gone. I took so many pills. It’s all bullshit.” I sighed, looked at her. “It’s all bullshit.”
“You’re taking mneme?”
“No. No, I’m not taking mneme. I don’t think I am. I took it in Japan.”
“But that’s not possible. How can it be in Japan already?”
“I don’t know. I thought I did. I thought I found out where it was coming from, but all that was bullshit too.”
“You don’t remember me?” She sat down next to me. I struggled beside her. She let me put my arm around her shoulders. The press of her body next to me caused my ribs to ache.
“Not like this.”
“Then how?”
“I remember a girl named Miho who looked like you.”
“And she was your girlfriend?”
“No. She was my friend’s girlfriend. We were just cheating together. But maybe we weren’t. Doesn’t matter now.”
“This is really messed up,” her voice was quiet. “And I don’t get it. Tell me what happened. Why are you hurt? Who did this to you?”
I closed my eyes. With them shut, I could imagine it was Miho next to me. For a second they were the same girl. And then the moment ended, and I told her what happened, about Ben and Jerry, tailing Ryan back to a door with his tag on it. She listened silently.
“That’s really random,” she said, when I finished. “But it makes about as much sense as anything else. You definitely got beat up.”
“I did.”
“Fuck,” she sighed. “I’m going to get rid of these pills.”
“It’s hard to do.”
“What is?”
“Getting off it. The withdrawal is bad.”
“What withdrawal? K stoppped taking it for about a month before she did it again last weekend. And she was fine.”
I shrugged. She stood up and went into the living room and I followed her. She took the bag of pills out of the drawer. I took my shirt off, gingerly. There were a number of dark bruises already visible on my side. May saw them and gasped, put the bag down on the desk. She touched my skin, gingerly.
“This is really messed up. I don’t know what to do with this. I just want to get away from this.”
“So do I.”
“You know what? My parents are away. They’re vacationing with some friends. You want to go up there for the weekend?”
“Up where?”
“To my parents’ - you don’t remember that either?”
“I don’t remember anything.”
She closed her eyes, touched the side of her face with her hand, set the bag of pills down on the desk.
“Why?” she said, and looked at me. Her eyes were hard. “Why did you lie to me?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“You’re right,” I said, and leaned against the desk. I glanced at the bag of pills, saw myself taking one and leaving this scene behind. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.”
“Just tell me why.”
“Because I wanted to be with you. Because you knew me.”
“It’s a pretty fucked up thing to do.”
“I know it is.”
“You should have told me the truth.”
“I’m telling you now.”
“And you’re telling me that you don’t remember me at all. That all the time we spent together is totally gone for you. Like it never happened. Do you have any idea how that feels? Like, what am I supposed to do with that? How can I even believe you? With these fucking pills, I don’t even know if this is happening or not. Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and you’ll tell me you do remember it.”
I’m telling you now.”
“And you’re telling me that you don’t remember me at all. That all the time we spent together is totally gone for you. Like it never happened. Do you have any idea how that feels? Like, what am I supposed to do with that? How can I even believe you? With these fucking pills, I don’t even know if this is happening or not. Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and you’ll tell me you do remember it.”
“This is real though. It is really happening.” I remembered Miho saying the same thing to me in Japan, and knew that like me, May wouldn’t believe it. Or that she couldn’t.
“I’m going to see if I have any disinfectant or something,” she said.
“Ok.”
She walked into bathroom. I looked again at the bag of pills lying on the desk. Before she came out again I took a couple and put them in my pocket. I don’t know why I did it. I think at the time I felt it might have been my only way out.
At the end of the street a group of young hipsters mill outside a bar, most of them smoking. Their voices cut into the air, loud, abrasive laughter, guys arguing. The sound of a bottle being smashed on the pavement.
I scan the crowd but Ryan isn’t in it. I walk up to a young blonde smoking by herself near the curb.
“This is the Boat yeah?” I ask. She looks at me like I’m something she coughed up. I smile at her.
“Uh, yeah,” she says.
I turn around. He’s here somewhere. The event he created on Facebook listed a graffiti project and then dancing at the Boat, so he’s either in the club already or still tagging somewhere. A little further ahead is the entrance to an alley. I walk over to it; at the far end end a small group of people stand watching a couple guys huddled next to the wall.
I walk into the alley, loose gravel and shards of glass crunching under my feet, weeds piercing the cracks in the pavement. The left wall is easily 30 feet high, solid brick painted peeling white. To the right are the backs of houses, poorly constructed wooden fences barely stopping their yards from leaking into each other. The space is dim except for a couple flashlights someone’s set on a couple crates. They shine against the wall, the backs of the artists; the one on the right is Ryan. Even with his back to me I can tell it’s him - the smooth line of his neck and the short crop of hair, the slight hunch in his shoulders that’s identical to Ryota’s.
I approach the group: two guys and two girls, plus Ryan and the other guy tagging the wall. The four of them standing look at me, but the artists don’t notice. One of the guy’s - black and rail thin - nods at me. The other, white, and bigger, doesn’t acknowledge me. He brings a bottle of Coke to his lips, swallows it, passes the bottle to the black guy, who does the same. Whatever’s in the bottle flashes clear beneath the Coke lable. Both the girls eye me.
“What’s up?” I say. The black guy shrugs.
“Hey,” says one of the girls, the less attractive one, in a small black dress, her heavy breasts puffing out the top. Her friend - prettier, slimmer, and bleach blonde, takes a cell phone out of her pocket and begins texting something.
“Sorry, just saaw these guys working down here and thought I’d come check it out.”
“You like graffiti?” asks the first girl.
“Mhmm.”
“You here for the Boat?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“They’re really good,” she says, as if it follows naturally.
“Who is?”
“Oh, them.” She nods to Ryan and his friend. The gay couple laughs, the black guy handing the white guy the bottle. Ryan works a can of black paint at the base of the wall, his friend filling in a looping coil with pink. The image is nothing I recognize; colour patterns, intersecting lines, a few loose circles. I can’t believe anyone would want to watch someone painting this, and then I notice the digital video camera set up on one of the crates, near the flashlights. The black guy sees me looking.
“We’re gonna time lapse it,” he says.
“Cool. And the restof you just like drinking in alleys.”
The bigger girl smiles, but the black guy looks at me just like the girl back at the curb did, like I’m something nasty he stepped on. He’s definitely gay - I wasn’t sure at first, but only a good looking woman or a gay man can give off looks like that.
Ryan stands up, shakes his arms out, turns to face us. He has a bandana tied around the lower half of his face. It once must have been white but it’s stained with so many coats and shades of paint that it’s nearly impossible to tell. He pulls the bandana down: his face is narrow, with high cheek-bones, wide lips. His black hair hangs in sharp points from his forehead. He’s pale; he looks exactly like Ryota bled of colour; his eyes are wider. He spits, drops his (empty) can of paint to the ground.
“Shit my knees hurt,” he says. The black guy offers him the bottle of Coke. Ryan takes it, sucking from it heavily, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Who’re you?” he says.
“No one,” I answer. “Just came down an alley.”
He shrugs, turns to the other artist.
“You almost done?”
“Almost,” he says. The black guy walks over to the video camera and turns it off.
“Let’s get out of this alley,” he says. The prettier girl has her cell at her ear, talking quietly. Her friend tries to look comfortable standing next to her. I lean against the back fence, trying to get a better look at the work they did on the opposite wall, but it’s too big to see fully. A point I put my eyes on won’t take in the whole of it. At the edge, beneath the work, is a fresh coat of white, underneath that, the outside rim of the previous mural.
“You like it?” asks Ryan.
“It’s big,” I say.
“Has to be, has to be. Anyway it’s better than the shit that was here before. More than half the work in the city is garbage. It should all be painted over.”
Something about him pisses me off.
“Maybe whoever threw that up before you wouldn’t agree.”
“I don’t care what they think,” he says, laughing.
“Come on,” says the white guy. “I wanna dance.”
“We’re all getting bored back here. And we’re attractin people off the street,” says the black guy. Ryan laughs. The other artist stands up.
“I’ll clean this up.”
“I’ll help,” says Ryan.
“Naw, it’s ok. I don’t feel like dancing.”
“You never feel like dancing.”
“Come on,” says the pretty girl. She puts her phone away in her purse.
“Yeah,” says the heavy girl. She glances at me, and it’s like she’s asking me to come too; it isn’t flattering - she’s probably just tired of hanging out with a bunch of gays. They start filing out of the alley. The second artist switches off the flashlights, starts packing them and the cans of spray paint into the milk crates. Ryan looks back at me, turns around and follows his friends. I wait for them to clear the corner and then I move to the far end othe alley.
“Can’t man,” I hear Ryan saying. “Got some stuff to take care of.”
“Come on!” says one of the girls.
“Sorry hun. Dance yer little tail off for me though, k?”
I watch him walk into view the opposite side of the street. He moves fast, pausing briefly to light up a cigarette. I round the corner and follow him.
He winds his way down the street, out of the Market, turning left on Dundas. The lights at Spadina wash the pavement, glint, yellow and red, over the hoods of passing cars.
He walks like Ryota, but softer, or maybe just more gay. He tosses the cigarette away affectedly in the middle of an intersection, pauses to let a car turn right and carries on past Spadina. After a block he turns into an alley. I turn with him; it smells of rotten fruit and drywall. On the left are piled bags of trash, the crumbling remains of a gutted building - scrap wood, electrical wiring, cracked cinderblocks, dust. Next to the pile is a dumpster overflowing with more of the same, an electrical pole supporting the weight of a circuit box, dozens of black cables. On the opposite side of the alley is a metal door next to a stack of milk crates. Ryan walks up to the door. I stop, then move around behind the electrical pole next to the dumpster.
He knocks on the door, once, hard. There’s a pause, and then it’s pushed open, just a crack. Ryan says something too low for me to hear. The door opens wider, and steps around and walks into the building. The door swings shut, and I can see the tag scralwed on it. His tag, the one from the show, and from Japan. The mnemonic.
The alley is quiet; a cat slips into view around the side of the dumpster, paws quietly at the trash. It looks at me, its eyes glinting points of light.
I wish I had a cigarette.
The door bursts open. Two guys step out - the two guys I followed here from the subway. They’re dressed almost exactly the same, in the same “uniforms” - business casual with name tags hanging at their necks.
I freeze, which is stupid, start walking which is worse - they see me instantly. The door closes behind them, and the car darts off behind the dumpster.
“Hey...” says the Middle-Eastern, grinning “Now I remember you.” He laughs.
“Shit, of all things you remember this dumb bastard?” says the black man.
“It’s a start,” he answers. To me: “Yo, what the fuck I tell you last time?”
I churn through responses, trying to land on the one that’ll get me out of here. Should I play it aggressive? Passive? Like it it didn’t happen.
“Huh?”
“You heard him,” says the black man. “Sure as shit you heard him last time. I know ‘cause he wouldn’t shut up about it.”
“Told you it wasn’t a good idea. Shoulda listened.”
“What the fuck are you guys talking about?”
I start walking and they cut me off. Behind them, the street is tantalizingly close - a couple teen girls pass on Dundas, walking bikes. Neither of them glance into the alley.
“No man, you aint leavin yet.”
“I think you got the wrong person or something.”
“Hey,” says the Middle-Eastern, to the black man. He tilts his head toward him, but keeps his eyes on me. “He doesn’t remember?” There’s a level of uncertainty in his voice that wasn’t there before.
“Maybe he does and maybe he doesn’t.”
“Yeah.”
“Shit, I don’t care if he doesn’t or not. Makes no difference to me - I remember. And I remember us tellin him not to come by no more.”
“Well,” starts the Middle-Eastern.
“What?”
“Well, I didn’t say that.”
“Huh?”
“I mean not exactly. I told him it was a bad idea but not that he shouldn’t come around again.”
“You told me you did.”
“Did I?”
“You dumb fuck. Why the hell are you telling me this now?”
This would be funny if I wasn’t scared, but I am; I realize it for the first time. When I met the researcher in Japan I’d been wary, but not scared. These guys are different, especially the Middle-Eastern; he cycles through versions of himself even faster than the researcher did, his personality shifting on a dime, from hard-ass to deferential and back. I turn around, start walking up the alley, away from the street (a mistake? But at least I’m moving.)
“Where you going?”
“Yeah man, stop a minute.”
They fall into step on either side of me. I swivel my head between them, the black man on my left, the Middle-Eastern on the right. The black man’s wide face is super-imposed over the faded, brick backs of buildings, the Middle-Eastern’s over fences, garage doors, the opening of another alley.
“My name’s...” The Middle-eastern starts, breaks off. He takes the tag hanging at his neck and reads it. “Jerry.”
“And I’m Ben.”
“Now where you headed?”
“Home.”
“Home huh?”
“That’s right.”
“You know, I think you should slow down and talk a minute.”
“We won’t keep you long.”
Ben puts his hand on my shoulder. It’s heavy and warm. I brush it off with difficulty. He puts it back, and pulls back; I skid to a halt.
“What the fuck man? Get your fuckin hand off me.”
“Don’t go takin that tone. You think it’s alright stalkin people?”
“What? Who’s stalking anyone?”
“Still don’t remember huh? You followed us back round here one day. Now, our friend Ryan tells us he had you followin him here tonight. And here you are. You think that’s right?”
“Why not?” I say, dropping the pretence that I don’t remember. It doesn’t seem like it’s working. “I did it all the time in Japan.”
“You think this is funny?” Jerry’s eyes are glazed, like plastic replicas. He licks the corner of his mouth. Ben’s hand on my shoulder has the weight of a prostethic. My stomach turns, and I run for it.
A hard shot to my foot: the pavement stands up to meet me; pain explodes at the side of my head, I taste blood. A brick hits me in the stomach, just below my lowest rib (not a brick - one of their feet, but felt like a brick); I retch, spit, curl into a ball. He kicks me again. Which one? One of them.
“This aint Japan fucker!” screams Jerry.
Lying on the ground, gasping, foreshortened pavement leading to an empty garage. The garage’s roof is made from a sheet of corrugated green plastic, the wall on the right the brick, on the left, a shitty wooden fence. At the back wall are a collection of boxes, old paint cans, and a large, wooden pagoda, complete with pedestal and an offering of fruit, a few burnt-out sticks of incense. What the fuck is that doing here? the thought is hard as the ground under my cheek.
One of them kicks me in the gut again.
“Hey, fuckin watch it!”
I look up: Ben has his arm around Jerry, holding him back (it hit me then, as hard as the kicks, as off as a pagoda in a back alley.) I spit laughter, roll onto my back.
“What’s so fuckin funny huh?” asks Jerry. He lands another kick. I groan, laughing harder, my hands cradling my stomach.
“Ben and Jerry? Are you fuckers on crack or something?”
“What?”
“You guys are fuckin ice cream!”
“What?” He says it again, his voice cracking. He seems to slump into himself, Ben’s grip on his shoulders loosening. He suddenly looks confused, like a lost child. “You sayin that aint my name? It’s written right HERE man.” He takes his tag and holds it up at me. “It SAYS so.”
“Oh shit man, really?” I get up to my knees, spit again, a loose trail of saliva hanging from my lips. “Well then I guess it must be your name. Shit. Somebody fucked you guys up real good huh?”
“You wanna talk about fucked up? Huh?” He springs forward, aims a kick - I catch his foot in my hands, my fingers nearly breaking; a cold laser of pain slices the length of my arm; I ignore it, turn inwards, drag his leg around with me. He lets out a muffled shout as he hits the ground.
“Shit!”
I get to my feet, run, stumble, my palms scraping the ground as I catch myself. I look around, see Ben pulling Jerry to his feet, and don’t bother waiting around to watch.
I run, turn down the nearest alley, a blur of graffiti and tags on the walls around me. My foot catches on something; it clatters away, hollow and metallic - a can. It lands in the gutter running alongside a doorway.
“Hey! You fuck!” The voice echoes along the walls, mixes and dies in the ragged sound of my breath, the drumline of my feet on the pavement.
I burst out of the alley, onto the street, nearly slamming into an old, bent woman pushing a shopping cart. Light burns my eyes: headlights, all yellow, streaking, the neon hung in restaurant windows, blue fish, red characters. Inside, happy people eat at tables with gleaming plastic table cloths, waiters in cheap suits.
I want to and don’t look behind me. I can hear them, running. At least they’ve shut up now; breath burns my lungs, lights burning my eyes, signs dripping off the sides of buildings - ALL YOU CAN EAT; FACTORY PRICE; SUN MING HONG; ORIENT HARVEST - a cab’s headlights and for a second I have an insane urge to flag him down (should have - they won’t do shit in public. What are they going to do? Drag me out of the cab? They might.) The cab barrels through the yellow light and, and running, I nearly fall into the hood of a car turning right, dodge it, narrowly; the squeel of tires. Someone yelling - Ben and Jerry? The guy driving the car? I don’t wait to find out.
Run. Legs move and eyes follow; I see myself reflected in store windows, over headless mannequins, displays of imported tank tops, cuts of meat, in the glass windshields of parked cars - and it’s my face, it is mine, the same face I’ve always had - an alley opens on the right and turn into it, swallowed in the shade of towering brick walls, a stench of leftover Chinese food, baked oil. At the end of the alley, a lower brick wall, graffitti - the word SKISM sprayed there, in red - and behind that someone’s back yard. I run to the wall.
“You’re done now! Done!” The voice (Ben’s? Jerry’s?) comes from the far end of the alley; I jump, hit the brick wall, the breath ripped from my lungs, fingertips straining at the top edge, muscles screaming - I pull myself over as a hand grasps my ankle. I twist it loose and fall onto damp earth on the far side.
I lie on my back. A mud-purple sky hangs above me, framed by the roofs of buildings, the wall. Breath pours from my mouth, gasping.
I can hear them scrambling on the other side of the wall.
“Ya see that?” says Jerry.
“Mutherfucker can jump. Shit.”
“Hey Ben!” I yell. “You talk like a fuckin stereotype ya braindead fuck!”
“Muchterfuck we’re not through with you by a damn sight!”
“Fuck this guy man, Jesus Christ.”
Something flies over the wall. It hangs in the air, black and solid, blotting a cut of sky.
“Shit!”
I roll; it lands - a brick - on the ground a foot from my head. I get to my feet, stagger forward. In front of me is the back end of a house, a glass door black as a mouth in the center of a narrow wall. I move around the side of the house to a gate, fumble with the latch.
“Hey!” I turn - Jerry’s head at the wall. “You’re not goin anywhere.” He pulls himself over the edge. I leave the latch, haul myslf over the gate and drop onto a concrete landing on the far side.
My left ankle aches, and my hip, a creeping, sick sore in my side where they kicked me. I run anyway, down the street. I want to run right, get back on Spadina, into the light, the signs of life (cabs, the rattle of a streetcar, some drunk kid yelling at his friend); I turn left instead, down a quiet, residential street of dead houses and blank cars.
I cross the street. There’s a large bush ringing the lawn of one of the houses, I dive behind it, pull myself over the grass and sit down in the small garden backing the bush, swaddled in shadows. I learn forward, press my face close to the bush. The leaves are cool against my skin, feel like they’re coated in a layer of plastic. Through the gaps in the leaves, the bony twigs, I can see a section of road, the porch of a house on the opposite street.
They walk into view, dress shirts untucked, dirt stains on the front of their pants. They stop in front of the house. Jerry laughs, but Ben looks worried.
“Lost the fucker...” His voice carries across the street.
“Yo that was pretty fucked up huh?”
“Man what you go kicking him around for? We weren’t told nothin about that.”
“I just lost it man, you know, I get like that sometimes. Hey you don’t believe him do you? About our names I mean?”
“Ah man, shut the fuck up about our names alright? It doesn’t make a difference what the fuck your name is. All you gotta worry about is what we’re supposed to tell him about this.”
“We just tell him he got away.”
“Fuck,” Ben says. He starts walking away. Jerry follows him. “You must be dumber than I thought if you think he...” his voice trails off as they move out of earshot.
I breathe out, lie back into the soft earth. There’s no way any of that just happened. A pair of goons named Ben and Jerry hanging in the back alleys of Chinatown? In business casual? That has about as much chance of being real as I have of figuring it out.
I stretch myself out, crushing the flowers in the garden. A low gust of wind rustles the bush’s leaves.
“What the hell happened to you?” Her voice shook as she said it, her face twisting. She hesitated, took a step towards me. I bent down to take my shoes off, slowly, working around the pain in my side.
“May,” I start, and the lie I’d prepared died on my lips. I drew a blank - I couldn’t remember what I was going to tell her. It was the first time since I started with the drug that I’d forgotten something, and the absence of memory was another kind of pain.
“May I have no idea who you are,” I said.
“What?”
I sat down in the middle of the hallway, stared at my feet. She stood in front of me, motionless.
“I don’t remember you. Not like this, not the way you remember me. I don’t remember a relationship with you, or you ever being in Japan. It’s all gone. I took so many pills. It’s all bullshit.” I sighed, looked at her. “It’s all bullshit.”
“You’re taking mneme?”
“No. No, I’m not taking mneme. I don’t think I am. I took it in Japan.”
“But that’s not possible. How can it be in Japan already?”
“I don’t know. I thought I did. I thought I found out where it was coming from, but all that was bullshit too.”
“You don’t remember me?” She sat down next to me. I struggled beside her. She let me put my arm around her shoulders. The press of her body next to me caused my ribs to ache.
“Not like this.”
“Then how?”
“I remember a girl named Miho who looked like you.”
“And she was your girlfriend?”
“No. She was my friend’s girlfriend. We were just cheating together. But maybe we weren’t. Doesn’t matter now.”
“This is really messed up,” her voice was quiet. “And I don’t get it. Tell me what happened. Why are you hurt? Who did this to you?”
I closed my eyes. With them shut, I could imagine it was Miho next to me. For a second they were the same girl. And then the moment ended, and I told her what happened, about Ben and Jerry, tailing Ryan back to a door with his tag on it. She listened silently.
“That’s really random,” she said, when I finished. “But it makes about as much sense as anything else. You definitely got beat up.”
“I did.”
“Fuck,” she sighed. “I’m going to get rid of these pills.”
“It’s hard to do.”
“What is?”
“Getting off it. The withdrawal is bad.”
“What withdrawal? K stoppped taking it for about a month before she did it again last weekend. And she was fine.”
I shrugged. She stood up and went into the living room and I followed her. She took the bag of pills out of the drawer. I took my shirt off, gingerly. There were a number of dark bruises already visible on my side. May saw them and gasped, put the bag down on the desk. She touched my skin, gingerly.
“This is really messed up. I don’t know what to do with this. I just want to get away from this.”
“So do I.”
“You know what? My parents are away. They’re vacationing with some friends. You want to go up there for the weekend?”
“Up where?”
“To my parents’ - you don’t remember that either?”
“I don’t remember anything.”
She closed her eyes, touched the side of her face with her hand, set the bag of pills down on the desk.
“Why?” she said, and looked at me. Her eyes were hard. “Why did you lie to me?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“You’re right,” I said, and leaned against the desk. I glanced at the bag of pills, saw myself taking one and leaving this scene behind. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.”
“Just tell me why.”
“Because I wanted to be with you. Because you knew me.”
“It’s a pretty fucked up thing to do.”
“I know it is.”
“You should have told me the truth.”
“I’m telling you now.”
“And you’re telling me that you don’t remember me at all. That all the time we spent together is totally gone for you. Like it never happened. Do you have any idea how that feels? Like, what am I supposed to do with that? How can I even believe you? With these fucking pills, I don’t even know if this is happening or not. Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and you’ll tell me you do remember it.”
I’m telling you now.”
“And you’re telling me that you don’t remember me at all. That all the time we spent together is totally gone for you. Like it never happened. Do you have any idea how that feels? Like, what am I supposed to do with that? How can I even believe you? With these fucking pills, I don’t even know if this is happening or not. Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and you’ll tell me you do remember it.”
“This is real though. It is really happening.” I remembered Miho saying the same thing to me in Japan, and knew that like me, May wouldn’t believe it. Or that she couldn’t.
“I’m going to see if I have any disinfectant or something,” she said.
“Ok.”
She walked into bathroom. I looked again at the bag of pills lying on the desk. Before she came out again I took a couple and put them in my pocket. I don’t know why I did it. I think at the time I felt it might have been my only way out.