"What would bad people grow?"

"I don't know. Bats? Mushrooms? Algae? But daffodils -they're the most innocent flower on earth. They're a member of the onion family. Did you know that?"

"I didn't."

"Learn something new every day."

"Aren't narcissus the same as daffodils?"

"They are. Most people think they're different. But they're not."

"Wouldn't a narcissus be, well, not quite evil, but not innocent, either - vain?"

"Reg had an answer for that. Do you want to hear it?"

"Tell me."

"He said, 'Who are we to slap the human sin of vanity onto some poor flower that did nothing more than be given a name?'"

"That's kind of nice."

"He also looked at the flowers at our wedding - anthuriums, ginger and birds-of-paradise - he said afterward that he thought they were 'slutty.'"

"Oh."

The two women watched me enter the kitchen. Neither of them had any illusions. Mom said, "Here's some orange juice. Your system's probably screaming for vitamin C."

"Jesus, Jason. Shave already. You could sharpen a hunting knife on your five o'clock shadow." Mom placed a soup bowl onto the counter. To them it was nothing, but to me this moment was a brief taste of heaven.

Barb asked my mom, "When did Reg start turning gonzo on you?"

"With religion?"

"Yeah."

"Maybe a year after Kent was born. There was no specific trigger. Jason, honey, use a napkin, I just washed the floor."

"Overnight?"

"No. I remember his face hardening about the same time -his cheek muscles losing slackness. It was probably something to do with serotonin. If I'd secretly dosed his coffee with Wellbutrin or another one of these new drugs, we'd still be a functioning happy couple. But instead he just kept losing it and losing it. By the time the kids started school, we were in separate beds. I was drinking big time by then. He liked it because it kept me in one place, and because when I was drunk, he didn't need to speak to me. Not like I wanted to speak with him."

Cell phone just rang. I have to go. Les says this week's check cleared, so why don't we go have a beer to celebrate? It's 11:00 A.M.

Okay, it's been six days since my last entry in this journal, and I'm going to record what happened as fully as I can remember.

Les and I went for a beer at the Lynwood Inn, a blue-collar place down at the docks beneath the Second Narrows Bridge pilings. I don't know if it was the heat, or that we weren't eating the free chicken wings, but by one o'clock we were blotto, when in walked this wharf rat, Jerry, who I met in court in 1992 - he'd been pulled over in an Isuzu pickup loaded with stolen skis. When the next pitcher of beer arrived, Jerry paid from a big roll of bills. He then said he had a seventeen-foot aluminum boat with an Evinrude SO for sale. It was down on the water and did we want to go for a ride?

The boat was a real sweetheart and dead simple: a hull, an engine, a front windshield and a steering wheel - basically a Honda Civic afloat on the harbor's brilliant glassy water. . . salt mist and galvanized metal; propeller blades churning in jade green water cut with pale blue smoke.

The harbor was dense with freighters, and there was this one Chinese hulk in the midst of loading up on hemlock two-by-fours. Some guy up on deck threw something at us - a lunch bag or something minor, but Jerry drove up to the side of the freighter, which resembled a rusting, windowless ten-story building, and started screaming in Chinese.

"Jerry — where'd you learn Chinese?"

"My ex. Eleven years of my life, and all I'm left with is Cantonese, hep C and advanced skills in seafood cooking." The guy up above disappeared for a second, and Les and I said, "Jerry, let's get out of here," but Jerry wouldn't listen. The guy up above reappeared over the edge and dropped what seemed to be a cast-iron loaf of bread - I have no idea what it was, but it rammed a hole the size of a dinner plate in our boat's hull. We sank quickly, and we swam to land near the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool. We found some ancient rusting rungs, which we climbed up; they put us in a hot, dusty railyard. We'd gotten coated with diesel oil during the swim, and the powdery gray dirt stuck to us like flour on cod. Les was furious because his wife had been haranguing him for years over his taste in clothes, and today was the first day he was wearing a pair of pants she'd bought for him. Les became morose: "She's going to fry my butt."

I said, "Jesus, Jerry, what did you say to that Chinese guy, anyway?"

"Well, he called me some names, and I called him some names, and then he said he'd sink the boat if I kept dissing him, and then he sank the boat. The damn thing was hot as a stove, anyway. Probably better that it sank." Jerry then flipped open his cell phone, saying, "Someone'll come pick us up."

In order to reach the road, we had to cut across eight tracks on which train cars were shunting according to laws unknown to us, each car capable of shredding us into french fries at any moment.

Out at the road, sure enough, there sat a black stretch limo. Its driver was Yorgo, a Russian gorilla who was also a clean freak. He insisted we take off our clothes and put them on a tarp in the trunk. I asked Jerry why there'd be a tarp in the trunk, and he said, "Don't ask."

So we sat in our underwear in the back of this limo. Les discovered some rotgut scotch in the limo's plastic decanter and tanked himself up even further, while Jerry began obsessing about finding identical trousers so Les wouldn't get in trouble with his wife. This struck me as manic, but then the Russian gorilla threw Jerry a Ziploc bag of coke, and I saw where the mania came from.

"I can't do coke. I really can't. Allergies. Anything that ends with '-aine'."

"I've heard of that. More for me, then." Jerry made a noise to Yorgo, and some pills appeared from up front.

"What are they?"

"Well," Jerry said, "one pill makes you bigger, and one pill makes you small."

I took two, and we drove around the city, and reached the conclusion that we needed to buy clothing, but first we had to wash. We bought a squeeze bottle of dish detergent and drove to Wreck Beach, at the base of the cliffs at UBC. Amid the overall nudity, our underwear attracted no notice. We left Les passed out in the car.

Out in the water we used the dish soap to scrape the diesel fuel from our skin, but a group of hippie kids saw us and began screaming at us for using squeeze bottle soap at the beach, and began pelting us with oyster shells, so we dropped the bottle and swam down the shore. Once on land, Jerry stole two towels from a log and we climbed back up the cliff, at which point I remember wanting some of the scotch Les was drinking - and then my blackout. Jerry's magic pills.

The next thing I remember is being in Seattle. Judging by beard stubble it was maybe two nights later. I was on Interstate 5 entering downtown, riding shotgun in an Audi sedan. At the wheel was a skinny junkie-looking guy with chattering teeth. He looked at me and said, "It's okay. You've got the money with you. The important thing to remember is not to panic."

Not to panic? Am I supposed to be not panicking about something? This wasn't a situation I wanted to be a part of. The car pulled up to a stoplight. I got out and walked through the first door I saw, which happened to be the west lobby entrance of a Four Seasons hotel. I caught sight of myself in a jewelry shop's display case: I was sunburnt and wearing a designer outfit like the ones in magazine spreads that no guy ever wears in real life. I had to shed this ridiculous outfit, but how? Where?

In the vest pocket a palm-thick wad of fifties, but no ID, which might prove to be a problem, what with being a Canadian in the U.S. most likely on shady business. One of Jerry's pills was tucked into a deep corner, so I wiggled it loose and popped it in my mouth. At the bar I ordered a martini and flirted with two women who were up from the Bay Area and who worked for Oracle's PR department. I wasn't in their league, but they were fun, and they made cracks about my jacket. In the men's room I removed it and buried it in the hand towel basket beneath a pile of towels. And then I blacked out once again.