"Can I have white wine?" I asked the bartender, a dark-haired and almond-eyed man whose musculature threatened to pop the b.u.t.ton of his white jacket. I offered him a flirtatious smile, if only because he was the sole man in the room who gave off an air of s.e.xuality instead of nerdy glee.

"Oh! Please! Don't even get me started on energy futures!" proclaimed the fellow behind us, chuckling at his friend.

"No, I'm serious," the friend protested amiably, "just give me a quick rundown on the numbers."

"So what are you going to propose?" another fellow asked a man who looked-I was fascinated to note-exactly like Peter on Family Guy, "Can money buy you love?"

"I'm gonna argue that money can buy you time," Peter answered with a grin, "which you need, while you wait for your lady to make up her friggin' mind."

"Frannie!"

There are some voices you never forget. Particularly the one belonging to the brother who hung you out the window by the ankles when you were ten.

"David," I replied, knocking back half of my gla.s.s in two gulps as I watched him wend his way toward us. "How you doing?"

My brother, resplendent in a gleaming red tie, gave me a one-handed hug and waved over his wife, Penny, with the other.

"Look what the tide washed up," he remarked happily.

David always seemed delighted to run into me. It was odd, though, that he had to run into me to ever see me at all. A curious "I love you, get lost" sort of vibe was at work there. My sister-in-law, on the other hand, approached me as if I were cat vomit. Oh for G.o.d's sake, another wet pile of hair on the carpet. David, can you please deal with this?

"Hi," Penny said, her shoulders tense within the cranberry cashmere turtleneck she wore over a black crepe skirt. She kept her hands clasped at her waist, unwilling to touch me. Her platinum blond hair, bobbed so that it curved inward at her piquant chin, barely moved as she nodded h.e.l.lo.

"Hi, Penny," I said, "how's it going?"

"Great," she replied, and gave me a toothy smile that reminded me of a chimp's grin. Thanks to Lester's nature shows, I'd learned that a primate grin served as a warning to other primates to f.u.c.k off right this minute.

"h.e.l.lo, I'm Avery Dellaire," said Avery, shooting out his hand for Penny to shake, trying to act as a diversion and make everyone feel pleasant again.

David took the cue and began chatting with Avery about books, explaining who Avery was to Penny, while I stood back, still unnerved. Relations between me and Penny had soured since Lester was born. I know it was my fault. I'd been housesitting for her and David while they went to England, and Calvin and I had made a bit of a mess. But usually you hope to get over these things in a family, let the water go under the bridge, once you've paid to replace the Belgian linen hand towels that you used as diapers and that sort of thing.

It just hadn't worked with Penny. I couldn't do the alchemy with her wherein kindness and a simple "I'm sorry" were transformed into the gift of strengthened friendship. When the conversation petered out between Avery and David we all moved on-the two of them latching onto the famous Boris, who had just swished past, while Avery and I scanned the crowd to no avail and felt self-conscious. I suddenly wished I could talk to Father McPhee. I wanted to be back there in that empty hospital room in the sunlight, conversing with somebody who welcomed what was truly on my mind. I didn't want to be in a room crowded with black-suited magpies, attracted to glittery words. I didn't need people who were clever, I needed someone who was wise.

28.

"You're stressed," observed Helen, leading me into one of her session rooms at the Oasis Hypnosis Clinic on Yonge Street. Was that the first thing she said to all of her clients? I followed her out of the clinic's soft-cushioned waiting room with its soothing framed seascapes. She walked ahead of me down the hall with a polished stride, her shoulders erect and her hips swaying, attired crisply in a chocolate-brown jacket and matching skirt. Her silvery-blond hair looked as solid as a mannequin's wig. I remembered that Kate had described her as a former management consultant.

We reached a softly lit room filled with flowers, and she gestured me toward a fat leather armchair that proved impossible to sit up straight in. As soon as I leaned back in the b.u.t.tery leather, I reclined like a splayed baby.

Helen herself sat lightly on a swivel chair beside a mahogany escritoire that held a ca.s.sette player and a notebook.

"Why are you stressed?" Helen asked, fixing me with huge brown eyes, dark as espresso.

"Oh," I shrugged, trying to raise my head out of folds of black leather. "I'm not. You know. I'm fine. My mother-in-law is dying, and I worry about Iraq. But who doesn't? And global warming, which I would like to see one single solitary politician somewhere this side of Pluto pay attention to before it's too late and my son finds himself abandoned by civilization as we know it and scrounging for snails. But that's just the same old same old. I'm not particularly stressed."

Helen nodded, smiling serenely. "Every issue is manageable if you have good techniques for managing your feelings about it. Hypnosis is a technique. There's no magic to it, no swinging pocket watch." She gave a merry little snort. "It's just a way to calm yourself down and focus your attention on your feelings, and then allow them to flow evenly, rather than getting knotted up in the chest. Does your chest hurt?"

She knew it did. I nodded, from somewhere deep within the chair. I felt as if I were a lost comb.

"Alright, then," said Helen, sitting back, "I want you to close your eyes and relax." She clicked on her ca.s.sette player, and the small cool room filled with ocean sounds. Helen lowered her voice to merge in pitch and rhythm with the waves, and guided me through a visualization sequence involving a beach. It's interesting that everyone a.s.sociates ultimate relaxation with being by the sea. I wonder if people who live on the coast all the time are more relaxed than everyone else, and can barely get off their backs, or whether they have a different imaging sequence. Do they imagine lying in a richly upholstered chair in an affluent city where they can actually afford someone like Helen ...?

"Now," she said softly, "I want you to go back to the first time you felt this feeling of stress and anxiety, the very first time."

I lay there like a felled tree, utterly immobilized, but my mind obediently began to stagger around in search of suitable memories. Eventually, all I could come up with was being afraid of the dark in grade four.

"Gooood," Helen said, soothing, when I raised my pinkie as she had instructed, to show that I'd remembered ... well, that. Enough. Indeed, I had remembered lying in my little bed with its Winnie the Pooh quilt, listening to my little battery-operated radio that was perched on the windowsill, even as I felt scared witless of the staircase outside my door. "Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy," warbled John Denver, and I loved him so much, he took the edge off my terrified suspicion that there was a monster on those stairs, possibly a serial killer, like the so-called Hillside Stranglers of Los Angeles, whose murders of young women were then in the news. Every night that year, in grade four, it all hung in the balance between my enjoyment of how sunshine felt on my shoulders, and my growing awareness of news. News went well beyond fairy-tale monsters and introduced me to actual terrors that my parents could not dismiss. I fought for balance every night for a while there, between ignoring monsters and fearing men as those stairs loomed and shifted in the shadows.

Helen, feeling satisfied by the raising of my finger, instructed me to go on and revisit all of my memories of anxiety, one by one, and to cleanse them by re-envisioning each event as a positive experience. Oh, sure. I could not, of course, begin to remember every preposterous fear I had ever had in my life, it would be like trying to recall the number of bananas I'd eaten. But still, relaxed and captive in her chair, I tried. I did. My brain cells fired sluggishly. I hit on the time I went camping in Big Bend and was mortally fearful of mountain lions. Then, ping, the choice moment when I realized that I was pregnant with Calvin's baby. The night, in grade eleven, that I heard on TV that the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan. The time I couldn't board a plane without the prospect of losing control of my bladder. The night Bernice and I played bingo and I won.

Finally, I gave up, and just listened to the ambient noise outside on Yonge Street. A car drove by, blasting Avril Lavigne. After a while, I realized that I was supposed to have raised my finger, to indicate to Helen that I'd completed the archival work. Done! Remembered every b.l.o.o.d.y thing that ever undid me, and with miraculous swiftness, too! I gave her the signal, and at once, Helen dispatched me to my earliest memory of life. I thought about it, and decided that it was disembarking from an airplane on a holiday to Mexico at the age of ... four? Brown faces. Heat rising visibly and surprisingly off the pavement. The novel fragrance of the sea. I raised a pinkie.

Encouraged, she pushed on. "Now you are two years old ..."

Had I not run headlong into the limit of recollection? But she urged me to visualize myself at two, then at one, and still younger and younger until there I was, she announced, to my surprise and her evident pleasure, in my mother's womb.

"You are in a velvety, enveloping darkness," she intoned, in her marvelous, mellifluous voice.

Oh, boy. I was keen to agree with her. I loved her voice, and the idea of where she was coaxing me, but really I had to concede that I wasn't inside my mother by any stretch of the imagination. I simply wasn't. It was a terrible thing to say, I sensed, but I felt very strongly that I was sitting in a chair at the Oasis Hypnosis Clinic.

Before raising my objections, though, I considered my options, for I felt deeply comfortable there, with my mouth hanging slightly open, even drooling a bit, and I decided, you know what? Okay! Spirituality demands the suspension of empirical knowledge. It calls out to the imagination, to gnosis, to the self as experienced without objective proof. An appropriate pause elapsed, dully respectful of a fully grown woman finding herself in her mother's long-forgotten womb. And another waved pinkie, this time feeling distinctly untruthful.

Next stop: a blue mist. Helen described it to me, and said I was to feel "peaceful and content," yet, "something is missing, a challenge," some ineffable sense impelling me back in time into ... my previous life!

"Your feet have landed on the ground," Helen said. "I want you to look down, and tell me what you see. What are you wearing on your feet?"

On my feet? Like, right now? Oh, G.o.d! I'm still thinking about the blue mist, whether it would be a dry ice effect, or what. I struggled to imagine my feet, and decided, lamely, I felt, that I was wearing a pair of sandals.

"Can you describe the sandals?"

Pause. "They have multiple straps."

"Look up from your feet. What are you wearing on your body?"

I had no idea. I couldn't see my body. All I could see was the inside of my eyelids. It felt wrong to baldly make things up.

"Look around you," Helen prodded. "Can you describe where you are?" I pictured a lake surrounded by dense forest. "Northern Europe," I told her, without confidence.

She asked me to go to where there were people. I visualized a tavern. "Who is with you?" No one. I was hesitant to populate it with the characters from Shakespeare in Love, whence the tavern image came.

"Leave the tavern," Helen said. "Try to find a mode of transportation." I ducked out of the tavern, and for some reason all I could see on the street was a foot-propelled scooter.

I suddenly felt the need to guffaw, but successfully suppressed it.

Undaunted, she sent me elsewhere. I envisioned a table outside on a hilltop, overlooking a lush valley. The vista looked suspiciously like the one I had seen on a holiday to Tuscany.

Helen forwarded me to the moment of my death and asked me to describe it. For someone so adept at imagining that precise thing, you'd think I'd come up with quite the scenario. But I was too relaxed to lie. And the truth was that I sensed nothing but a streetcar rattling by outside on St. Clair Avenue. A few minutes later, a phone rang somewhere. After that, I heard the swish of silk as Helen crossed her legs. The insides of my eyelids remained dark.

"I'm blind," I suggested.

"Go on," she prodded.

"And deaf."

She sighed.

"All right, then," she asked. "What are the lessons you learned in this lifetime?"

Er ... ah ... oh come on, Helen, don't do this to me.

It's not healthy to live your life as a static tableau with no people in it?

You are what you wear on your feet?

Love is blind?

We headed back into the blue mist.

"Maybe I didn't have any other lives," I told Calvin when I got home and called him in Cape Breton, before running back out to fetch Lester from daycare.

"Maybe you were a plant," he suggested.

Hindus would have thought of that.

"Calvin, are you smoking?" I asked, for I heard him exhale.

"Yes, I am."

"Why?"

Calvin hadn't smoked in years. Well, he smoked pot, of course, but never in houses or on phones. Usually just in the alley behind bars when he was waiting to hear or play music.

"I'm smoking because I want to knock five years off my life so that I never have to wear a pair of Depends."

"Oh, come on." I pulled off my socks and eased under the comforter in our bed. Cradled the phone and closed my eyes.

"And if that doesn't work, Frannie, then as soon as I hit eighty, I want you to shoot me in the back of the head. I never want to p.i.s.s myself, and I never want to forget where I put my drum kit. And let me tell you this, if I can't remember who Lester Bangs is earlier than eighty, then you have to shoot me then."

"I'm not going to shoot you-"

"Lemme finish. I see absolutely no redeeming f.u.c.king point to being too old to hold my water or follow the plot of a TV sitcom. Because you know what? I've been a baby. Been there, done that."

"You've been drinking, haven't you?" I asked, more curious than indignant. Calvin liked his beer, but usually in modest quant.i.ties. Rarely did I catch the slur I was hearing tonight in his speech.

"Yes, I have! Me, Dana and a pitcher at the Room with a Cue. And if I develop liver disease, I will send out my own f.u.c.king party invitations. You know why? Because I'd rather go down in my prime than waddle around in diapers blubbering about swollen legs and stolen rugs."

"But that doesn't have to happen," I argued, more or less for the sake of argument, since I understood perfectly what he meant. "Look at Pica.s.so, or Dr. Richardson."

"n.o.body but Pica.s.so gets to be Pica.s.so, and Richardson's a freak, a weird, battery-operated antique. How useful has he been? I can't even find him and I've been in this G.o.dforsaken place for a week now."

"It's not about being useful, Cal."

"No?" he bellowed. "What's it about then? Living just to go on living? What's the purpose of that? Tell me, Frannie, tell me. You can't swing a f.u.c.king cat these days without hitting another headline about oatmeal adding two years to your life. It's all this dumb-a.s.sed tally of years. Years doing what, Frannie? What do you want three point six more years for, if you're going to spend them sucking air out of oxygen masks and repeating your anecdotes?"

I sighed. "If it helps, Goran says to h.e.l.l with a long life if you can't smoke Camels."

Calvin remained silent.

"You there ...?" I ventured.

"My mother overdosed on some medicine they gave her today to control her swelling, and started hallucinating. She thought she was being chased by bears. She was screaming, Frannie, and there wasn't a b.l.o.o.d.y thing I could do."

"Oh, G.o.d."

"What is the purpose of this?" he asked at length, his voice breaking. "What's the point?"

"She has you," I answered. "Isn't that something? She has you with her, and your dad waiting for her, and you just have to lead her on through."

"Oh, man," whispered Calvin, and he sounded so broken, I wanted to wrap my arms around him and make him whole. "I don't know, Frannie, I don't know."

29.

"Did I ever tell you about how Tolstoy nearly killed himself when he was fifty?"

Of course Avery is going to ask me this kind of question on a Monday morning.

"No, you never told me about how Tolstoy nearly killed himself when he was fifty."

Avery launches into discourses on nineteenth-century writers the way other people begin jokes by saying, "A man walked into a bar."

"So, Tolstoy was famous at that point," he went on. "Married to the love of his life. Abundant children. Vast estates. Uhhhh. But he was, I gather, suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of meaninglessness. I think he said something like ... uhhh ... 'Well, I'm as famous as Gogol, now, and Moliere and even Shakespeare. So what?'"

"What did he mean, so what?" We were in our familiar dinner-table positions, gazing back and forth across six feet of s.p.a.ce.

"He meant there was no meaning. So, so what? If life had no meaning, beyond what was really, essentially reducible to physical reproduction, then all he was doing was a fancier variety of a fruit-fly dance."

"Oh." That was interesting. Calvin should've been there-he'd have cheered right up.