March 22, 2006

Wearing a dead man’s jacket, I rode the cusp of seven traffic jams to reach Toronto. My reward was to see Trevor strut towards me from the darkness of an alleyway; I jumped on him like a mad thing.

Ten thousand words rushed out at once from our throats, overlapping awkwardly and flailing their arms.

“Food!”

“Yes!”

That’s how we ended up inside a deserted Thai restaurant, demanding red wine and shouting loudly about assholes, squirrels, popes, syphilis, and prostates. I told him about fingers, muscles, and orgasms. He told me about abandonment and hurt.

Somehow, as we grew older we became creatures of devastation and abandonment. Indeed, Trevor became an expert on the matter and gives interviews regularly. “This woman I never met performs martial art dancing and wants to ask me about abandoned buildings for a magazine.” It all sounded bizarre and unreal, so I believed him.

We continued to talk lewdly hours later, parked in his garage drinking beers. The radio played an intoxicating mixture of Beowulf and traffic commentary, causing us to bang our heads against the windshield exclaiming, “What the fuck are they thinking?” There was some deep analysis too on the programme, which left us profound unimpressed: “Cars on the road are a concrete manifestation of the Hobbesian state of being,” the CBC said.

And we laughed, turned off the radio, and invade his apartment. We drank. Talked. Destroyed. At some point, we grew strangely excited about built-in vents in batteries, dead hookers, portraits, and mirror images.

At the peek of our enthusiasm, he cried: “Go out there and make sure the city is still alive. For yet another day! As long as we can confirm that Toronto is still there, we can go to sleep easier.” The night was cold and full of lights and the city mocked us with its silence.

So in return we stripped to our underwear and I lost consciousness on strange, comfortable beds. I think I dreamt of devastation and prostates. The dream character said: “I found mine in the shower,” and sure enough when I looked in the bathtub I saw a giant sack of nerve endings soaping itself with obvious pleasure.

I woke up soon thereafter to make coffee and crawl into Trevor’s bed. It was too damn early and I didn’t want to leave for my conference. We growled and stretched and soon I was late, pulling up clothes in a whirlwind, and shouting to Trevor, “Good bye, good bye, it’s been great.”