Down here, down here: The psychic sponge-bed, the hole at the world’s heart, that well of poison loneliness every cemetery elm knows with its great tap-root. Here’s where we float, my fellow dead and I—one of whom might be Ray, not that he or I would recognize each other now.

The keenest irony of all being that I suppose Ray killed himself for me, in a way—killed himself, by letting me kill him. Even though . . . until that very last moment we shared together . . . we’d never really even met.

Come with me, I said. Not caring if he could, but suspecting—

(rightly, it turns out)

—I’d probably never know, in the final analysis, if he actually did.

Down here, where we float in a comforting soup of nondescription—charred and eyeless, Creation’s joke. Big Bang detritus bought with Jesus’ blood.

Ash, drifting free, from an eternally burning heaven.

Keepsake

There is no such thing as evil, just the gradual

removal of good until nothing is left.

—St. Augustine

IT’S FUNNY HOW the hardest moral questions only ever occur to you long after you’ve lost the power to answer them. Or to put it another way:

How many times have I asked myself what it is with some people, but not given much of a fuck either way? Because the plain fact is, nobody can cure themselves of someone else’s disease. The world’s full of dying parasites; you can’t hold them all, wipe their eyes and their asses, change the channel and tell them one more time how they’re going to a better place. Sure, we all talk a good game—but no one actually has the time for that kind of love, let alone the strength.

And I only ever really loved one other person on this whole rotten planet, anyways, aside from my own stupid self.

Now it’s long past five in the morning, and I’m still crouched out here in a nest of long grass, halfway into the junk-choked sump that passes for a yard between the Tar Baby dance club—heavy metal and formative rock cover bands all night, every night—and its nearest neighbor, Calypso Heaven. Sitting back on my heels with Jos’ second-best gun in my hands, last night’s frozen mud already seeping through the seat of my jeans. Sitting here listening to the distant cries of my little brother Loren, as they seep up through those six-plus feet of dirt I piled on top of him last night—after I dragged his limp, rug-wrapped body down all three flights of rusty fire escape from our former mutual home, and rolled him ass-up into a shallow grave.

Thinking about how he’s already been dead for a year and a half, and the only difference now is he’ll finally have to start acting like it.

* * *

Around twelve-fifteen last Thursday, I jerked abruptly awake at my usual table in the Caf Shack on the corner, and for a good minute and a half, I couldn’t remember what I’d come there for in the first place. There was a cup of half-price latte in front of me (Steamy Thursdays, Get It While It’s Hot) and a half-smoked cigarette in my right hand, burnt down almost to filter—a shaky column of ash, poised and ready to gild the tattoo winding across my Mound of Venus and up around my thumb with grey. A snake, a triangle, two moons and a line of star-pointed Coptic crosses, all based on some Moroccan wedding designs I found in this old issue of National Geographic Rennie stole from my last social worker’s office: The kind of shit they usual

ly do with henna on the big day, then leave on until you wear ’em off playing unpaid workhorse for your hubby’s family, long after the roast lamb’s all been eaten and the band’s gone home to sleep.

I remember how the tattoo artist laughed when I showed him the ripped-out page I wanted him to copy them from. Smirking:

“Guess you can kiss your day-job ambitions pretty much goodbye with this one, huh?”

And I just smiled back, ever so slightly. Thinking:

Yeah, that idea would probably scare me too, if I’d ever actually had a day job.

Outside the Caf Shack window, it was just another post- ozone-depletion February in Toronto—equal parts frigid and uncertain, pedestrians eddying to and fro outside like ghosts beneath a livid, parboiled sky. Streets slick with yesterday’s slush, already turned to ice.

Then I let my attention focus back inside the window frame, and realized the guy who’d been cruising me for the last few minutes—so overtly, he could’ve been wearing a big neon pink sign on his forehead—was actually somebody I knew, or used to. One of Jos’ regulars, back in the days; back when I was one glam, Iced-up little Goth girl and Jos was my main squeeze, Mr. Trent Reznor Superfly, all black eyeliner and free drugs to anybody who shared his musical tastes. Before Rennie finally followed my example, broke and ran from that pit we once both laughingly called “home,” turned up knocking at Jos’ and my apartment door, and we let him crash in that little room next to the iguana tank—the one with no shades on the window, no lock on the door, and nobody left unstoned enough to check who was going in and out, especially during one of our legendary three-day parties.

Before Rennie got sick. And Jos went to jail.

And I ended up in this limbo I’ve been living, every day-for-night since.

I nodded at the chair next to me, and took another leisurely gander out the window—more than long enough for the guy to take the hint, and slide his skinny junkie ass down in it.

“Hey, Ro,” he said, in a tone he probably thought passed for cheerful. “Long time, man.” Then, small talk over: “You holding?”

I tapped the ash. “Not here, I’m not.”

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