But over the years, his whispering became harder to contain, and he managed to offend a Polish first officer and was let go. Sitting beside an American in a beachfront drinking establishment in Shanghai, just a long table under a bale of thatch, he overheard the man say he’d signed a contract on a bulker to the Great Lakes. Titus followed him to the wharf and signed his name.

He rode again through the locks, this time climbing them like a long staircase. But he learned from a crewmate that Thunder Bay got very little grain traffic these days. So he hopped off and caught freights back and forth across Canada, east and west, each time sailing through Thunder Bay, unable to locate the courage to jump off. In his new life he could pass days like a blink and months in an afternoon. He found he preferred rail travel to shipping. On trains he met every manner of low creature, tucked away in all the nooks and crannies that railcars accidentally provide. A man who injected grain alcohol into his veins with a hypodermic needle, who could attain pure, shambling drunkenness with a capful of cheap vodka. Another man who snorted brown powder from a baby food jar and slept twenty hours of twenty-four. People missing half their heads, half their hearts; people who’d stabbed their families, and who’d been stabbed—by their families and otherwise; people who’d been raped and had raped, not necessarily in that order. There existed a crude system of exchange between American and Canadian currency, cigarettes and jugs, the rates for which were maintained collectively in their heads. They passed around the ugliest money he ever laid eyes upon. Bills soaked in blood, urine, semen—animal and human. Money begged for, killed for, hidden and squandered and stolen a thousand times over. He never raised a finger toward any of them, because none was worth helping or hurting, and he received the same indifference in return.

Then one day while catching out of Steinbeck, Manitoba, he climbed onto a gondola car loaded with big packets of lumber that already sheltered a bedraggled man. “Room for two, fella,” the man said, and Titus tucked himself into the space beside him. Titus nodded but didn’t speak. Since he’d been riding trains, the whispering had worsened, and his words were further jumbling in his head, as though someone had taken a sledgehammer to the card catalogues in the library of his mind.

But after a day of watching the prairie rip past from their nook on the highballing train, the man zeroed in closer with a finger in Titus’s face. “I recognize you. The elevators. We worked an unloading crew,” the man said. “I heard you was dead.”

“Things … change,” Titus managed to get out right.

“Sorry I can’t rightly place your name there, fella,” the man said squinting. “But welcome home besides.” Luckily, by the empty closets of his eyes and the way decades of cloudy brandy and sleepless transience had carved from him all glimmers of vitality, Titus could tell this was a man accustomed to ghosts.

After that Titus hopped off in the yard near Pool 6 and considered going to her straightaway, but first he wanted a look at the elevator. He needed to take it slow, as though he were coming up from the deep ocean. Finding the elevator abandoned, he slept overnight there, and despite the sickening sight of the water out front that had swallowed his best friend, he found comfort in its smells: train diesel and the linger of grain dust. From high in the workhouse he’d look up to Thunder Bay and scarcely recognized it after all those years. But it was good to be near where she was. Better even.

Then one morning he shaved and washed up and regarded himself in a rearview mirror he’d pulled from an abandoned truck. With his skin tanned and eyes clear, he looked like something not quite dead, something almost worth forgiveness, even for the worst things, especially by someone as good as she was. He followed the creek up to her house and found it dark. Part of him was proud of her for leaving. He returned each Sunday night for years, watching, until one day the lights were on, and he saw her, twirling a little boy around, dancing together in the lamplight among the furniture, and it was then he realized a wall had been built between him and the world of houses. Between him and the world of calendars and dancing and dinners steaming on tables and children drinking glasses of milk with two hands. He could not track his mess into their house. Into these bright, buoyant lives. He belonged to a different world now. Outside hers.

16

One October afternoon Will returned from skateboarding to find something pasted to the outside of the picture window in Cairo:

please go back inside for your own good. or else. there will be turmoil.

He rushed out and snatched it down before his mother saw it. The words were crudely formed on a flattened carton, ballpoint pen dug into the waxy cardboard.

“Why the hell would a threatening note say ‘please’?” said Jonah later when Will brought the sign to their crime lab. “Doesn’t make any sense.”

“And does it mean, like, there will be ‘turmoil’ no matter what?” Will wondered. “Or does it mean ‘or else there will be turmoil’ and the period was like an accident?”

“No clue,” Jonah said.

After some further discussion, they brushed the sign for prints and came up empty. The boys returned to Will’s house and searched the soil under the window. There they discovered the same boot prints Will had found the previous winter, same hexagonal imprint, right where Will had watched the blue jay die. This time Will ran Inside to fetch his mother’s old Polaroid camera from behind his boxed masterpieces in Toronto. “I have an idea,” he said.

The boys rolled downtown to a workwear store called Pound’s that they’d often skateboarded behind that summer, which, judging by its mustiness, dated signage, and general disrepair, had been open since well before Will’s mother last breathed fresh air.

“Yup, used to sell those,” said the aged, squinty clerk when Will showed him the photo of the boot print, forgetting all the times he’d shooed the boys from his parking lot. “Not anymore, though. Used to assemble them right here in Thunder Bay. But I sold my last pair years ago.”

“Any idea who wore them?” asked Will.

“Workers mostly,” he said. “A popular choice. Lots of fellas wear them. Miners, boilermakers, grain trimmers, loggers—you name it.”

“Right,” said Jonah once they were back Outside. “So we’re looking for someone who’s insane, can’t breathe, collects garden hoses, has poor grammar, and wears old boots nobody sells anymore. Awesome.”

“Every clue counts, Jonah,” said Will. “But that last word of the note really does seem like something the Wheezing Man might write.”

A week later, while doing laundry in Toronto, Will pinched a pelt of dryer lint from the trap and tossed it in the trash. Remembering that his mother had asked him to fetch her old Bolex for her, he stood on an overturned bucket and retrieved the camera’s dusty case from back near the wall where he’d stashed Marcus’s bloodied shirt. When Will was younger, she’d taught him how to use the Bolex to make a short Claymation movie of a volcano erupting and engulfing a village. Will realized now that he and Jonah could make their own skateboarding movie, like the Californian skateboard videos they worshipped, and resolved to do it once they found Marcus and everything went back to normal. Will yanked aside a box, crashing masterpieces to the floor, and something caught his eye.

“Where did these come from?” he said, setting the pair of work boots down on his mother’s comforter, boots that had sat unremarkably in Toronto for as long as Will could remember, the exact hexagonal pattern he’d been searching for embedded in the tread.