Kyriakides: And why you were there?

Benjamin: I knew that, too. [Pause.] You have to understand, it was the end of his road. He’d gone as far as he could. [Pause.] He wanted to die, but he didn’t want to kill himself.

Kyriakides: I can’t imagine John saying that.

Benjamin: Oh, he would never say it. Especially not to you. He doesn’t trust you. He’s never forgiven you.

Kyriakides: For making him what he is?

Benjamin: For leaving him alone.

Kyriakides: But surely—it’s possible now that he is dying. And yet he fights it.

Benjamin: The funny thing is that he’s changed his mind. He thinks maybe there is a reason to go on living.

Kyriakides: Can you tell me that reason?

Benjamin: No.

Kyriakides: He doesn’t want you to.

Benjamin: Right.

Kyriakides: You know that about him?

Benjamin: I know a lot of things about him.

Kyriakides: Have you always known these things?

Benjamin: Known them, maybe. Never thought about them much. Never used to do this much thinking!

Kyriakides: Is that because of the way you’re changing?

Benjamin: Could be. [Another pause.] He’s all through me now, you know. We’re sort of mixed together. There used to be a kind of wall. But that’s breaking down.

Kyriakides: Well, I think that’s good, Benjamin. I think that needs to happen.

Benjamin: Well, it isn’t easy for him. He’s fighting it.

Kyriakides: That’s unfortunate. Why is he fighting it?

Benjamin: The same reason he wanted to die, back on the island. Because he hates me. Didn’t you know that? He hates all of us. [A longer pause.] Almost all.

Benjamin came into the room while Amelie was packing.

Amelie ignored him—just went on emptying the big chest of drawers into her ragged Salvation Army suitcase, pretending he wasn’t there.

After a time, watching her, he said, “Where will you go?”

It was a very Benjamin thing to say. Straight to the point, no bullshit, kind of little-boy innocent. It reminded her of what she had loved about him and what she still loved, and that was painful; she winced. She looked up at him. “I don’t know. Maybe back to Montreal. It doesn’t matter.”

He said, “I wish you wouldn’t go.”

She turned to the window. The snow was still falling. Fucking horrible winter. That was the thing about winter in this city. It was likely to do any fucking thing. If you were ready for snow you got rain; if you were ready for rain you got ice. “I thought you understood.”

“You’re leaving me.”

She turned to him. “So? You left me.”

“No. John left you.”

“But you were talking about leaving. Even before that. And when you finally called, you called Susan.”

He shrugged, as if to say: Yes, that’s so.

She said, “Things had already started to change, hadn’t they? Even then. You knew we couldn’t stay together. You knew what was happening.” He did not answer, which was answer enough. Amelie nodded. “Yeah—you knew.”

“I know a lot of things I don’t want to know. A lot of it is John. There’s more John now than there used to be.” His frown was huge. “I wish you would stay a while longer.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s cold out. Because you don’t have anywhere to go.” That helpless look. “Because there’s nothing anyone can do about this, about what’s happening to me.”

Amelie narrowed her eyes. “How do you know?”

“John knows. Kyriakides was lying all along. He lied to Susan about it. But John can tell. Kyriakides wanted to do the tests, and maybe he thought there was a chance that something would happen, something miraculous. But there’s nothing. He knows it, John knows it. That’s not why they’re here.”

“Why, then?”

“Kyriakides is here to finish his experiment, and because he feels guilty. John is here—well, it’s an experiment of his own. But for me, I think it’s only the end. I’m scared of that.”

“Goddammit, Benjamin!”

She held out her arms for him. He put his head against her shoulder.

She was blinking away tears. But who was she sorry for? Herself or him? Maybe both of us, Amelie thought. Two fucked-up losers. She just felt so sad.

“Nothing is the way it used to be,” he said. “I love you.”

“I’ll stay a while longer,” Amelie said. “It’ll be okay.”

Not believing either of these things.

After some time had passed he helped her unpack again. He was about to leave the room when he reached into his back pocket and said, “Almost forgot—this came for you today.”

It was a thick manila envelope bearing the return address of the Goodtime Grill on Yonge Street.

He held it out.

Amelie took it from him, frowning.

After the humiliation involving his sister, Roch had checked himself in at the Family Practice Clinic at Toronto General Hospital. A few days later and he might have run into Amelie while she was in town for John’s PET scan. But he wasn’t looking for Amelie—at least, not yet.

His chest was a mass of bruises where the car door had slammed into it. The clinic sent him up for X-rays, but there was no evidence of any significant fracture to the ribs, which was good; it meant he wouldn’t have to be taped. Hurt like shit all the same, though. The doctor, a woman about as tall as Roch’s collarbone, asked whether he’d been in a fight. He said, “A fight with a fucking Honda.”

In return she flashed him a skeptical, condescending look … which burned, but Roch kept carefully silent; this was not the place or the time. He was getting older, developing an instinct for these things—when to hold his tongue and when to act. He merely stared into the female doctor’s wide green eyes until she frowned and looked away. Roch smiled to himself.

She cleared her throat. “Warm baths might help with that bruising. Maybe Tylenol for the pain. You’ll be fine in a couple of weeks. If you stay away from Hondas.”

“It wasn’t a joke.”

“What?”

“About the Honda. It wasn’t a joke.”

“No … I guess it wasn’t.” She bowed her head and made a notation in his file folder. “Is there anything else?”

Roch stood up and left the office.

The landlady had wanted to kick him out of Amelie’s apartment, but she backed off when he paid two months rent in cash and promised to clean the place up. He told her he was working as a clerk for the provincial government. Which was a lie, of course; he’d picked up the rent money doing day labor. His life savings, ha-ha. The fucking check had taken two weeks to clear, or else he’d have spent it by now. But it was important to have a place to sleep.

Though he hated being alone.

It was getting harder all the time.

At night, especially. With Amelie gone he didn’t have to sleep on the sofa, but the bedroom was like a big box with its single square, soot-darkened window. He would lie awake in this cold, dark room and feel the city pressing in at him. The city made a noise, as familiar as his own heartbeat but more disturbing. Sirens, motors, tires gritting down cold night streets. This noise was amplified by the winter air and beat against Roch’s eardrums until he could not distinguish it from the singing of the radiators or the rush of his own blood.

He resented the sound. It was the sound of everything he could not have: pleasure, companionship, confidence. He couldn’t walk those streets except as an outcast. He had learned that lesson when he was very young. Nowadays he did not attract much immediate attention; he was older and less physically grotesque; he worked out in the gym. He was not the puddingy, froglike thing he had been as a child. But he was not one of those ordinary people, either. He could not move among these handsome men and confident, smiling women except as an impostor. He might have been a creature from outer space, disguised as human. He knew that.