himself of his views.
“Profanity,” he told her. “It’s not the same as obscenity. It’s about fear and conceit.”
“As opposed to privilege and conceit?”
“Like spitting in a windstorm, whistling in the dark.”
“Which?”
“Both. If you spit upwind, it hits you in the face. Downwind and it’s sucked out of your mouth. Either way you’re diminished. You’ve challenged the wind and, paradoxically, you’ve proved its power. A simple ‘god-damn’ and you’ve reaffirmed your sad relationship with an indifferent God.”
“My goodness!”
“Whistling in the dark — you asked? A string of profanities is a feeble emulation of Descartes. I swear, therefore I am. Invariably, it’s the believer who swears at God, since profanity only works if on some level you know it’s profane, and it’s only profane if God is real. And if God’s real, then maybe you are, too.”
“You don’t swear because you’re an atheist!”
“Yes.”
“You’re a strange man.”
“Thank you.”
“Thank you, Morgan.”
She now heard their words echoing inside her skull, and the chambers of her mind seemed to open in all directions as she fell into deep sleep.
Morgan wandered south along Avenue Road in the late afternoon, passing through what he regarded as home territory. Sauntering by Annesley Hall and Victoria University, down past St. Michael’s College, he acknowledged that his roots were right here. The University of Toronto was oddly secluded from its urban setting and yet criss-crossed with busy streets that declared its relevance to the city and world at large. This was where he had stepped outside the boundaries of his upbringing. He had been raised in Cabbagetown during its transition from poor place to rich, but he grew up in a different way between Queen’s Park and Bloor Street.
Walking east along College Street, he spied with satisfaction the familiar planes of glass and granite shimmering in the cool autumn sky, but until he was almost at Bay Street, nearly in front of police headquarters, he had no sense of the parts coming together. The entire complex, which took up the better part of a city block, was a building that literally worked — a marvel of materials and design. The rosy pink granite and gunmetal steel that might have been daunting deconstructed with casual elegance as one entered from the street and walked through a welcoming mélange of space sculptured on a human scale. The imposing structure, redolent with power and authority, was still a secure and accessible place for visitors and people who worked there. Morgan regretted that to truly appreciate the whole one would need to clear away the surrounding buildings. The structure must have been breathtaking on the drawing boards.
Morgan strolled past reception and was greeted cheerfully by his rank, detective sergeant, rather than by name. He blushed at being recognized, feeling somehow that the young woman, whose own name he didn’t know, was privy to his intimate adventures with the Bobbsey Twins.
The twins and he were history now; they had made choices that weren’t his doing. Nancy with the big blond hair had married a cop, was pregnant with her second child, and lived in the depths of Scarborough. Anne had tried modelling, he had heard, but her voluptuous lips had led only to lingerie catalogues of the second order, and she was now a vice squad cop in Vancouver.
Still, whenever a pretty young receptionist smiled at him, Morgan was discomforted by a vague sense of the erotic. He would hurry past with a shy smile, avoiding eye contact, and would feel a tickling sensation of relief when he was safely on the elevator. Sometimes he would flirt with women his own age to prove to himself that he was normal.
Morgan slumped down at his desk and began to wade through the accumulated paperwork. Mostly, he came in when Alex Rufalo, the superintendent, wasn’t present. Rufalo tended to work executive hours — long but with weekends free. Others around Morgan, after initial salutations, left him alone.
By early evening he was on top of things. Not finished — “things” were never finished — but they were under control. He reached into a bottom drawer and took out a crumpled linen jacket. Lying under it was his standard-issue 9 mm Glock semi-automatic and a shoulder holster. Despite regulations, he seldom carried his gun. Miranda did more often, but it always seemed to him that homicide was the one detail where guns were redundant. The critical focus was on people who were already dead.
On the way home he stopped in at a bookstore on Bloor Street and picked up a short-story anthology, along with a gourmet sandwich and a yogourt shake to go at a place next door. He was too tired to read, so he ate in front of the television, watched back-to-back episodes from the Law & Order franchise, and went to bed. He dreamed sporadically of full lips and police procedures and judges on high benches, some of them comic and others quite sinister.
Sunday morning Morgan woke up feeling queasy, as if he had endured a train ride in a windowless sleeper, conscious the whole night of the tracks clicking beneath him. He called Miranda again, but there was no answer, and hung up before having to deal with her voice mail.
Settling in for a good read, he selectively worked his way toward the Yukio Mishima story in the middle of the collection he had bought. The first piece was Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.” He was struck with how a story about female empowerment could have been written by an icon of machismo. Perhaps Hemingway had had no idea what he was doing. Maybe that wasn’t at all what he had wanted and that was why the story was subversively powerful. Then there was a story by D.H. Lawrence — “The Rocking Horse Winner” — that blew him away. It was about a kid’s pact with the devil. The boy wins and dies. He read William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” twice. It was the most masterfully grotesque story he had ever encountered — the horror of necrophilia and a mouldering corpse not just macabre but a haunting representation of Faulkner’s American South. Next he read a story by Alice Munro with the disingenuous title “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You.” Disingenuous was the operative word. The detailed idiosyncrasies of a few charming characters in small-town Ontario gradually resonated with each other to reveal genteel emotional mayhem, suicide, and possibly murder.
While he read “Patriotism,” the Mishima story, through his own sensibility, Miranda was always in mind. And Eleanor Drummond. Following the course of the warrior’s blade, driven by will through the intricate design of his gut, Morgan felt an overwhelming sense of estrangement. Seppuku meant nothing to him, a horrific gesture; and it was undermined, as Miranda had said, by the quiet devotion of the wife dying without vainglory as if death were a domestic detail.
Morgan felt like a voyeur peering into a world so different from what its author must surely have meant to convey. He closed the book and thought of Miranda living in a parallel world, utterly estranged from her watcher. He thought of Molly. He thought of Eleanor Drummond, the absurd humility of her end, the outrageous conceit. He wanted to phone Miranda again to share his reading, but the more he considered it the more he realized he had nothing to say.
Miranda touched her eyes, trying to affirm that she was awake. A faint hum from the ventilation system accentuated the darkness clenched tightly around her. She was shivering and drew up the blanket. Her mouth was dry, but when she ran her hands over exposed skin it felt clammy. The air was thick and warm. She removed the blanket, not wanting to sweat. She needed to vomit, but she didn’t want to lose fluids and fought the spasms in her gut by opening her eyes wide and focusing on an imaginary horizon above her. After a while, the
