My girlfriend never forgave me for letting Ryan and Billy crash with us that night. Things only got worse between us from there. She went off to Toronto and I stayed home. Ryan and Billy moved into a rooming house, which they could barely afford between their welfare checks, so they supplemented their income by panhandling. Ryan was back across the street outside Schwartz’s, but he could never again stay the night at Max Ygoe’s studio. He tried to sell his drawings; I even gave him ten bucks for one, though I can’t tell what it’s supposed to be. It hangs over the couch he slept on that night he saved me from being found unconscious and surrounded by drug paraphernalia at a murder scene.
Billy died later that year. He was found among some garbage bins behind the Belgian fries place in the heat of summer, near Duluth, a needle sticking out of his arm. Overdose was the verdict, yet Ryan swore to me that it couldn’t have been an accident — Billy was too experienced and careful for that. According to him it must have been on purpose.
Later that year a guy started making a film about Ryan, a documentary about his fall from grace and his life on the street. And when it won an Academy Award two years later, Ryan and his buddies were watching the Oscars on the big screen at the Bar Saint-Laurent, so he saw his eventual triumph, and not long after he succumbed to the cancer he’d been ignoring for a couple of years.
Wild Horses
by Arjun Basu
Mile End
Albertson wakes to the sound of horses galloping. He looks out his window, and yes, there are horses racing down his street. He watches them cross another street and run into the darkness, toward the condo construction site two blocks away. He pinches himself to make sure he’s not dreaming. He can already see himself at work, saying, You know what I saw this morning? He will tell his story unless the media picks it up first, and they are sure to — someone’s probably blogging about it right now. Either way, he’ll still have a story. His story. And women love horses.
Albertson is the manager of a shoe store downtown, and all of his employees and customers are women. And these women are not the types to drag around their indifferent husbands, the kind of men who show distaste with aggressive boredom. No, Albertson’s shoe store is for women, for girlfriends, the kind of women who will be impressed by horses running down the middle of a city street.
After a quick scan online and a survey of the local TV networks, Albertson finds no media reports about horses running wild though the city. There are no blogs, no status updates, no photos. The radio is silent on the matter of horses invading Mile End. In both languages.
Albertson’s blood feels like it’s changed color. Why is no one acknowledging what I have just seen?
He walks up his street, past the butcher with the grass-fed veal, the boulangerie owned by the tattooed guy, and the ceramics shop with the collection of fine art chopsticks. When he turns the corner, he sees orange-helmeted construction workers standing under the green loft project and condo developments that are surely going to change everything about this place. And then there, just beyond the construction site, is a hole in the ground, where fresh horse shit has been flattened by traffic. The unmistakable smell of horse shit steams from the hole, filling the air. It is obvious.
Albertson walks up to a hip young man wearing a tartan bowler hat and a skinny blazer, and asks, “Do you smell that?” The man stops and sniffs the air.
“What?”
“Do you smell something odd?”
The man in the bowler hat takes a good deep whiff. Deliberate. He’s polite. “Like out of the ordinary?”
“You don’t smell it?” Albertson is incredulous.
The man sniffs the air again and looks at Albertson before walking away, breaking into a trot after several paces.
Albertson wants to reach down and touch the horse droppings, but he has to get to work. He wants that horse shit to be horse shit, so he walks over to it, looks around, and puts his right shoe in the biggest pile. The give. It goes right through his brown Oxfords, right up to his brain. It registers as horse shit; he smiles triumphantly.
He returns to his apartment and changes into another pair of brown Oxfords, putting his single shit-encrusted shoe into a plastic bag and into the freezer. He goes to work.
At work he waits. He waits for one of his employees or a customer, anyone, to bring up the horses. Every time his phone rings, he expects a call about them. He checks the Internet constantly, his social media channels, the news. The city must know there are wild horses about. They are running up our streets at night, shitting near half-finished condos, and running some more. He has proof of these things. He smelled it. He saw the horses. He heard them and then he saw them and then he smelled them. That’s three senses.
Albertson swims through the day and no one brings up the horses. The radio is silent on horses. He googles it, because at the end of day, if it isn’t on Google, it isn’t real. Nothing turns up.
He begins to entertain the possibility that perhaps there were no horses. He asks about horses on his Facebook page and receives no response. After he closes the store, he races home to inspect his Oxford shoes, and there it is. Horse shit. He has horse shit on his shoe. It wasn’t a dream, it was real. He has a shit-covered shoe in the freezer. It’s his link to an event he knows happened. To a specific reality.
Albertson goes to the park to investigate. He walks up to a dog owner who is waiting for the inevitable to drop out of her animal’s backside. Albertson approaches the woman and her dog cautiously.
“Were you out last night?” he asks, which is the wrong way to approach a stranger, he knows, but he can’t take it back.
“Excuse me?” she replies, looking at her dog as it squats, getting in position. She knows she’s trapped. She can’t get away. Not yet.
“Sorry,” Albertson says. He stammers a bit and pushes his hair back. “Last night. Here. Did you see them?”
The woman is distracted by her dog. It’s not doing what it needs to do. The thing is a small mongrel, definitely some type of terrier.
“The horses,” Albertson clarifies in a soft whisper. He feels like a dissident in Communist Germany. “They galloped down this very street. A herd of them.”
She smiles sympathetically. “Are you crazy or is this an elaborate pickup line?”
Her dog has shifted position, walked to another spot a foot away, and is trying again. Albertson can sense its exertion. “I wish,” he says, still whispering.
“You wish what?” she asks. “You can do it, Bella. Go on.”
“Early this morning. I saw them. I heard them. I even stepped in their poop.”
She puts a finger to her lips to shush him. “Don’t say that,” she says, lowering her head. “We’re not supposed to talk about it.”
Meanwhile, Bella squeezes out a small turd, something small, even for a little dog. She seems satisfied, however, and comes over to sniff Albertson’s pant leg.
“Good girl!” the woman chirps. Bella looks up and wags her tail.
“We’re not supposed to talk about what?”
“There were no horses,” she says, giving Bella’s leash a yank and walking away without bagging her dog’s poop.
At the other end of the park, Albertson spots another dog walker, an elderly man with a robust German shepherd. The dog takes note of him as he approaches, and sits, alert. Albertson slows his walk.