So I can see him
As he rides by.
sang Adrian, who did sometimes sing songs meant for women’s voices without bothering to change the pronouns.
As he rides by, love,
As he rides by.
So I can see him
As he rides by.
Alex sat down in a chair, trying not to make any noise, but Adrian noticed him, of course, lifted his head from the guitar and stopped singing.
‘Well. Hi there.’
‘Hi,’ said Alex.
‘Waiting for someone?’
‘No. Just hanging out.’
Adrian nodded and put the guitar down into its case. ‘Okay.’ He snapped the case closed and seemed to be thinking for a moment.
‘You want to see our miraculous lightbulb?’ he said at last. ‘It’s been burning for more than eighty years without ever being replaced. The angry little old lady wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury about it.’
‘Did he come and see it?’
‘He never wrote back. I think she was pleased, it gave her something else to be mad at. “There’s no excuse for this! Doesn’t he open his mail?”’ Adrian stood up and led Alex over to a niche in the wall that held a baptismal font and a small light with a red glass shade. ‘Now, you understand I can’t personally verify that it’s been burning for eighty years. All I know is that we haven’t replaced it in the two years we’ve been here. But I’m firmly told that it’s been the same lightbulb as far back as the oldest person in the parish can remember.’
‘Awesome,’ said Alex.
Adrian looked at his watch. ‘Well. I’ve got a kid coming in for a guitar lesson in a little while. But I could make some coffee if you want.’
They went into the little kitchen off the church hall, the actors throwing them suspicious looks. ‘It’s not just you, James,’ one of them was reading solemnly. ‘We men have to tackle our sexism as a group! And we’ll do it as a group!’
‘There’s an idea,’ said Adrian, pushing the kitchen door closed. ‘We could do that.’
‘Is two men enough of a group?’
‘I’ve never been part of a bigger one.’
‘I’m not sure I’m up to heavy-duty tackling, though.’
‘Oh well. Another great opportunity lost.’ Adrian reached up into the cupboard. ‘Is instant okay? ’Cause if not there’s, well, nothing actually. Maybe a teabag.’
‘Instant’s fine. By the way, your cupboards are full of herbal shampoo.’
‘I know. Crazy Larry’s been dumping his hot goods on us again.’
‘Is this a routine thing with churches? Receiving stolen goods?’
‘Pretty much, yeah. I mean, the general public would be surprised.’ Adrian set a kettle onto the burner. ‘So, there’s a fire burning at a warehouse out in Scarborough,’ he added. ‘They were talking on the radio about evacuating people. Chemical fumes. There’s a theory it was set on purpose.’
‘By who?’ asked Alex.
‘The Mad Poisoner, I guess. He’ll be dropping acid in the reservoirs next. Do we have reservoirs? I’m not sure.’
‘We have Lake Ontario.’
‘Yeah. That’d kind of dilute it, I suppose. When you were a kid, did you get those scenarios about the Russians putting LSD in the water supply?’
‘Not that I can remember,’ said Alex.
‘Okay. Maybe I just had weird parents. Anyway, the thing about the Scarborough fire, everyone in Scarborough is just sitting in their houses waiting to be told what to do. We don’t have much of a gift for chaos.’ A twist of steam rose up from the kettle, and he poured the water over coffee crystals in two white mugs. ‘I don’t think people are as scared of LSD these days,’ he went on. ‘So it’d have to be something else in the water. PCP, would that scare people?’
‘No,’ said Alex, taking one of the mugs. ‘Chemical warfare stuff. Or maybe disease. Ebola. Smallpox.’ The imaginary doctor, pouring a test tube of cloudy liquid into a vat at the R. C. Harris Filtration Plant. Putting a match to a pile of rags in a suburban warehouse. Thinking of love.
Adrian poured sugar into his coffee from a tall glass dispenser on the counter, and stirred it again, hiking himself up onto one of the counters. ‘That’s true. It’s an infection-based paradigm.’
‘You like the word paradigm, don’t you?’
‘I like that it’s gone out of fashion. Slightly obsolescent terminology is my deal.’ He blew on his coffee. ‘I could say they’re just worried about nothing, but maybe that’s the thing precisely. Nothing can be extremely disturbing.’
Alex sipped the coffee, which tasted of little except a certain artificial bitterness. ‘I was listening to one of your old tapes the other night,’ he said.
‘Huh. That’s something I don’t hear very often.’ Adrian looked down at his mug. ‘I put too much sugar in this. Anyway, infection. It’s all about people touching each other, isn’t it? Proximity. Half the congregation won’t drink out of the common cup any more. I’ve been counting.’
‘Susie, Suzanne, she’s planning to write an academic paper about it. But she thinks she has to talk to the girls from that first incident. Which I doubt she’s going to be allowed to do.’
‘Proximity’s a difficult issue for people,’ said Adrian. He pushed his glasses up on his nose, and then spoke quickly. ‘You should have kept in touch, Alex.’
Alex leaned back against the other counter. ‘I thought I did,’ he said softly.
‘When you moved? You never told me, remember that? I tried to call you and your number was disconnected, you didn’t even have a message with the new one. So you can see, you know… yeah, I could’ve looked up Deveney in the phone book, but it seemed like you were sending a kind of signal there.’
‘I didn’t mean to. I just forgot.’
‘Well. I guess that’s kind of true.’
‘It is true. I mean, I don’t even remember now, honestly. But I’d know if I’d done it on purpose.’
Adrian nodded. ‘Okay. That’s okay.’ He looked up, took another sip of coffee and grimaced. ‘It’s really bad with all this sugar.’
‘You could pour some water into it. But I don’t suppose that’d solve anything.’
‘So which tape were you listening to, actually?’
‘The live one. Remember? You can hear Harold Kandel yelling in the background?’
‘Oh yeah. He had this plastic bag with a radio in it. And when I asked him to turn it off he went into this thing about Minnie the Moocher. How she was a low-down hoochie-koocher and so forth. But I knew he was trying to be supportive.’
‘It was meant as political commentary, I think.’
Adrian stirred his spoon around the oversweetened coffee. ‘I did kind of like that tape.’
‘It was good. Your songs are good.’
‘I guess. In their way.’ Adrian checked his watch. ‘I should get back. I don’t want my student being forced to tackle sexism as a group. But it’s nice to see you.’
He let Alex out by the church door, and as Alex left he looked back and saw him standing in the doorway with his hands tucked into his armpits, watching down the street for his student, small and quiet, perfectly alone.
At the corner of Yonge and Gerrard, four men sat on the ground in handcuffs, in a ring of police and campus security. Two of them, manic and agitated, were arguing about who had hit who first, while the other two leaned back against the wall with a strangely cheerful air, as if this were an interruption in the daily routine staged only for their entertainment.
‘He’s a fucker, that guy,’ commented one of them.