"Once he had that insight, then he couldn't go on deluding himself that anything he did was important, and there was nothing for it but to kill himself."

"Did you hear about this on The Oprah Winfrey Show?" I wondered.

"What do you mean?"

"Never mind."

"Okay, no, let me read it to you. I've got it here on the shelf." Avery found the book he wanted and spent some time flipping the pages until he put up a hand, as if to silence me, and read aloud: "'My position was terrible. I knew that I could find nothing in the way of rational knowledge except a denial of life; and in faith I could find nothing except a denial of reason, and this was even more impossible than a denial of life.... According to faith, it followed that in order to understand the meaning of life I would have to turn away from reason, the very thing for which meaning was necessary.'"

Avery paused, and twisted his arms, fixing me with a searching stare. I stared back, blank. So he moved ahead in the text, and finished with: "'Faith is the knowledge of the meaning of human life, whereby the individual does not destroy himself but lives. Faith is the force of life. If a man lives, then he must have faith in something.'"

Avery looked at me expectantly. I took a deep breath, and then inhaled. I took another deep breath and inhaled again. "Okay, this is good." I returned his gaze, smiling. "This is way better than what Job said. I think I can actually turn this over in my mind."

To that end, I sat at my desk with the pa.s.sage from Tolstoy that Avery had read aloud, and read and reread it for an hour and a half, trying to make sure that I was square with what he meant. Did Oprah go through this, I wondered, when she announced she wanted Anna Karenina for her book club, or was it just mothers like me, caught between Avery-ness and Lester-ness and Calvin-ness who felt like they were studying a bingo sheet and trying to figure out where to stamp the bits they recognized before time ran out.

30.

"Momma, what are you doing?"

"You shouldn't be awake, honey. Why are you out of bed?" I clutched the red pencil I'd been using to edit O'Sullivan's column more tightly, annoyed by the sudden interruption. Lester failed to sense my mood and climbed onto the futon couch beside me.

"I had a bad dream," he said.

"Like what, sweetie, what did you dream?" I pulled him closer.

"I dreamed that Daddy turned into a tin can."

"A can?"

He nodded, and bent his head to my chest. I smoothed his hair and stifled the urge to run screaming into the street in my pajamas, beating my chest and demanding to know why no one ever made any sense. Instead, I gave him a kiss and recommended bedrest as the best recovery from dreams of shocking transformation. "Just lie down and think of good things," I suggested. "Imagine eating an ice cream sundae on the beach." He wiggled off the couch resignedly and padded back upstairs.

I returned to my work, which was giving me a headache. The column that O'Sullivan had written this week was about gay marriage: how "weak politicians quailed" in the wind of "whiners' rights" and invariably capitulated to every impetuous human demand. Marriage was a "sacred union" between a man and a woman, and nothing in scripture allowed otherwise. Was there any point, I wondered tiredly, to reminding O'Sullivan that marriage was a civil contract that had nothing to do with the Church until the eighteenth century? The lower cla.s.ses used to jump over broomsticks to cement their bond. Actually, if I felt that he was interested in genuine argument, I might be excited to point out the historical context of marriage. But by now I had realized that O'Sullivan was merely enamored of rhetoric. This was just "be it resolved" with a c.o.c.ktail in a written form.

What had I been thinking, agreeing to edit the man? I suppose I hadn't ever read through the Volcano before taking the gig, but I ought to have known. I started reading his stuff aloud to Avery to see if I could enlist his a.s.sistance-the two of us marveling that it had this surface flair, this ability to use nouns and verbs in the same sentences and to pull off pleasing metaphors, but it wasn't written in Human.

"There are always going to be certain genres," Avery said a couple of weeks ago, as we sat at Nate's Diner on Spadina Avenue around the corner from the office, "art catalogs, for instance, that cannot be accused of being written in English, without successfully defending the charges. But O'Sullivan's trouble seems different."

"How so?" I asked, smoothing sour cream over my perogies.

"Maybe it's just me," Avery mused, "but I tend to think of human rants as having a fairly predictable overlay of delivery and content. Uhhh ... I mean, a traceable connection between emotion and style." He shot one arm out and scratched it absentmindedly. "Consider, for example, the statement 'f.u.c.k you, I hate you f.u.c.king f.u.c.kers.' Nine times out of ten, this statement will be shouted, snarled or-in writing-scribbled with many words in italics ending in exclamation marks. Right?"

I nodded, and washed down my perogies with a nutritious sip of Sprite.

"Sometimes, depending upon the rant, an object will be thrown ... uhhh ... or dishes swept from a table. A door slammed. A column completed in CAPITAL LETTERS. In any event," Avery bent over to take a slurp of his soup, "the wellspring of emotion will be clearly in evidence. But this is not the case with Sherman. He is able to write, in essence, 'f.u.c.k you, I hate you f.u.c.king f.u.c.kers' with an air of cool detachment, as if he were an economist musing on the prospects for third-quarter recession."

"But his emotional content twists off within the first few sentences," I joined in, "and then you find yourself following an increasingly bizarre trajectory of deeply felt hostility toward the French."

"Exactly," said Avery, "like that time last year when he called the French 'cheese-eating surrender monkeys.'"

We both fell silent for a time, concentrating on our lunches.

"Maybe he was given up for adoption by a French mother," Avery concluded, pushing away his empty bowl and tossing in the crumpled napkin.

"That's possible," I reflected. "My mother says you cannot know a man until you see him en famille."

31.

As it happened, I had a chance to see O'Sullivan en famille a short while later, but it turned out to be the incorrect famille. Or, more properly phrased, the illicit famille that he would just as soon not have introduced to me.

This unexpected encounter came about due to Lester's newfound interest in five-pin bowling. He had recently attended a birthday party that took place at a bowling alley, and now it was the thing to do instead of watch TV. Go to the Dufferin Mall lanes, spend an inordinate amount of time trying on ill-fitting bowling shoes, purchase nachos with Cheez Whiz, and then wing ball after ball a full two feet down the lane, thence to dribble into the gutter and stall out about halfway toward the never-struck pins. It was fun. This is what the pair of us happened to be engaged in one Sat.u.r.day afternoon when I noticed, to my utter astonishment, O'Sullivan sitting on an orange plastic chair two lanes over and feverishly nuzzling a woman's slender neck. She was pretty, with her dark hair pinned up, and she was more or less ignoring him as she offered up words of encouragement to their daughter, a plump girl of twelve or so who was clearly very keen on her game.

"How odd," I thought. I had never imagined Sherman doing something as plebeian and PG-rated as hanging out at the Dufferin lanes. I watched him with his family for a while, and then en route to the concession stand for a refill of nachos, I took Lester by the hand and ducked down to lane six to introduce myself.

"Frannie!" O'Sullivan cried out in mortal terror. "What are you doing here?"

I hesitated, thrown off stride by his anxiety. His Gerberbaby eyes were as wide and frightened and fixed on me as if I were holding aloft a hissing grenade. Reflexively, I looked down at myself. "What's wrong?" I asked. When he didn't reply, I gabbled into the ensuing silence, punctuated as it was by bowling b.a.l.l.s crashing into pins. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to disturb you, I just thought I'd introduce you to my son and-you know-say h.e.l.lo to Cheryl." I looked at his wife, hoping that she'd smile.

Cheryl, who had risen and now stood with her arms crossed tightly against her low-cut black T-shirt, regarded me angrily. "My name isn't Cheryl," she said, glancing pointedly at Sherman, as if this were the very essence of all arguments they'd ever had. "His wife's name is Cheryl."

"Oh!" I exclaimed as Lester tugged on my arm, unwilling to be interrupted in his pursuit of nachos by an unfathomable conversation. "I'm sorry. I just-it's nice to meet you ..."

"Gail," she offered tersely.

"Gail," I echoed. "Well, I work with Sherman, anyway, so I just wanted to say hi."

At that, I turned tail and followed Lester to the snack stand.

O'Sullivan caught up to me in the staircase at work in the following week.

"Frannie," he ventured, skipping up the steps and then pressing his fingers into my forearm to halt me. "What you saw-she's an old friend of mine."

"Right," I said lightly, refusing to look at him. I didn't want to know, I didn't care.

"It would be wrong of you," he added, as I attempted to politely pull my arm away, "to draw salacious conclusions from what you saw."

Oh, how strange, this was going to be about my moral judgment? "Forget about it, Sherman," I muttered as he let his hand drop, "we have nothing to discuss."

"No," he said, easing into a grin, "of course not. That is the point."

32.

Sherman O'Sullivan reminded me of my uncle Svend. It took me a while to figure out the similarity, given that Svend was a neuropsychiatrist who paid scant attention to politics and didn't bother to be charming. He was obsessed by his science, and spent endless hours in a laboratory at Toronto's Western Hospital on the fringes of Chinatown. I didn't imagine he paid much attention to his workplace community at the corner of Dundas and Bathurst Street, which featured a McDonald's staffed by South Asian immigrants who handed out biscuits, as per the company's dog-friendly policy, at the drive-through, while bellowing: "You need dog food?" Nor the Scadding Court Community Centre, which sometimes filled their swimming pool with trout and had a fishing day, or Kim Bo Restaurant, the Balloon King and the Chinese grocery fronted by crates of withered bok choy. Svend zoomed back and forth in his polished Lexus from the hospital's underground garage to his home in Rosedale, wholly unconcerned with the intervening world.

Lately, he had been experimenting with what he called the G.o.d Helmet, a canary-yellow hard hat that he'd outfitted with electrical wires. According to my mother, who followed his academic papers, Svend had devised a method for electrifying the brain's frontal lobe in such a way that it could induce mystic visions, thus invalidating all spiritual epiphanies throughout the millennia of human experience and chalking them up, instead, to random electromagnetic perturbances. To go about this business of neatly erasing the insights of the prophets, Svend employed unwitting subjects from the University of Toronto, who strolled into his lab in faux Beatles haircuts, listening to Outkast on their iPods. After an hour-long session in the helmet, they staggered out and walked, elated and unseeing onto Dundas, en route to amazed proclamations to their friends about being in the presence of G.o.d.

Svend wrote them up as case reports for conferences he attended on neurotheology. Religious belief is all in the mind, Svend and his neurotheology colleagues told one another, sipping coffee from paper cups in far-flung hotels buzzing with brainy excitement. These researchers were disciples of Darwin and devout followers of evolutionary psychology, who deemed faith an evolutionary adaptation of early hominids. G.o.d enabled humans to cope with consciousness without going mad. How this worked was unclear to me. I suppose the branches of hominid that hadn't developed the G.o.d gene drove themselves crazy with death anxiety and eventually all cut off their ears like Van Gogh, or committed ma.s.s suicide. Who could know?

My cousin Kate denounced her father's work as a venal attempt to justify his leaving Aunt Mary and her, by proving that there was no immutable standard of ethics. Without a G.o.d, there needn't be guilt, except where it was convenient for cooperative survival. Kate called this the "sociopath's creed." My father, who was Mary's older brother, tended to agree with her. But I wasn't sure. After puzzling over O'Sullivan's weird fear of liberals, I got to thinking that Svend was mostly driven to condemn sentiments that struck him as disorderly because of his own fear of chaos. He was always on the brink of flying out of control. He'd had two marriages, numerous affairs and a long bout with alcoholism. He drove way too fast, and had a volatile temper. Like O'Sullivan, he loathed ambiguities, and perhaps it all boiled down to a need for control. The world was a chaotic cosmos filled with tempests and temptation, and science, in Svend's case-or absolutes, when it came to O'Sullivan-served as the best method of containment. A lid for Pandora's box.

I was never certain which came first, Uncle Svend's control-freak personality, or his impulse for excess. All I knew was that, for a man devoted to order, he had a marked habit of fostering discord every time he got up in the morning. He was, for instance, a legend in the family for holding parties that began with light chatter and anecdotes and ended with objects being hurled across the room.

I almost missed Kate's birthday party (case in point) because Calvin was still in New Waterford and Lester had come down with the flu. At the last minute my father, who preferred books and comfortable couches to predictably histrionic dinners at Svend's, offered to babysit for me. He wanted to show Lester his new collection of Curious George books, republished with all of the original ill.u.s.trations.

Thus freed, I bought Kate a copy of Chicken Soup for the Deeply Offended Daughter's Soul, and drove off to Rosedale, a grossly affluent and intriguingly maze-like neighborhood filled with mansions concealed behind maple trees. I don't know why, but it isn't possible to travel a single street in Rosedale for more than three blocks without somehow arriving back at where you began, having been fooled by the street's subtle arcing. You cannot reach your destination without getting lost at least four times-it's like a poor person's baffle. Only residents of Rosedale, and outsiders with supreme determination, ever manage to prevail.

Svend inhabited an austere, ivy-covered brick house, which he shared with his third wife, Rose, the daughter of a liquor scion whose fortune will secure Svend's retirement fantasy of being one of the first private citizens to rocket to the moon. The trade-off, as my mother pointed out, was that Rose was a questionable candidate for the t.i.tle of domestic G.o.ddess, ill-suited to a man who stored everything in neat containers. Rose loved entertaining, but she didn't much care for sweeping, and she fancied herself an artist who liked to work with felt and human hair, which made her house look like a rodent's nest. She also had a flock of insane Pomeranians, who lent an interesting ambience to the household. Between the canine hysteria and the human hair, it was difficult to figure out how Svend had fallen so in love with Rose that he could actually dwell on the premises. But that's the funny thing about love, isn't it? Sometimes the heart wants what the mind cannot abide.

I liked Rose. Personally. I thought she was very warm, always curious and graciously self-effacing. Kate despised her, and rarely accepted an invitation to Rose and Svend's house for dinner. But this year, Aunt Mary had encouraged Kate to go.

"Just go, go! He's your father," urged Mary, a practical woman who got over Svend's departure far more swiftly than her daughter.

I parked my car behind the Toyota SUV my brother owned, which had sparked several arguments between us, with me favoring the environment and him favoring his wife Penny's phobia of dying in a car accident. As I entered the house, the Pomeranians swarmed around my feet, barking and trying to herd me back out the door as if I were a serial killer with a chainsaw.

"Stop," urged Rose, shooing at the dogs mildly with her hand. As always, she had parted her thick auburn hair far to the left, so that a curtain of tresses fell down the right side of her face, hiding the scars she'd incurred a few years ago when she fell off her bike into the gravel of the driveway. She was so clever and consistent about this hairdo that I had only ever seen her left eye.

My brother David was in the drawing room, nursing a bourbon as he reclined in a wingback chair, leg crossed and foot swinging in the air. "I haven't seen The Pa.s.sion of the Christ yet," he was saying, his lips drawn into a smirk, "but I'm certainly enjoying the drink of the house. How was the day of the sister? Still concerned about the illness of the son?"

I smiled. It was odd, I thought, that Penny wasn't here. Had she and David had a fight?

"Frances's more abiding concern is the sickness of the mother-in-law, David," observed my own mother, seated in a love seat next to Rose, clutching her gin and tonic and gazing disapprovingly at her son.

"Oh dear," said Rose, reaching her arms up to me, "I'm sorry to hear that, Frannie. I hadn't heard that Calvin's mother was sick. Would you like a scotch?"

I sat down in the wing chair that matched my brother's and smoothed out my skirt, now smeared with pawprints. "I'm okay, Rose, thanks."

"Rough about the mother-in-law," offered David, in the gruff, game tone of someone consoling a friend from a losing city about the hockey playoffs. "So is she toast, or can they treat her?"

"Those are the options?" asked Kate, suddenly aroused from her sullen position in the corner of the room beside a square of human hair mounted on a chrome pipe. "Death or repair, like a broken car?" Kate sounded mocking. She never had liked my brother. "What about how she's feeling emotionally and spiritually, David?"

"Okay, okay." My brother genuflected toward Kate. "Beware of the wrath of the cousin. I know all about spiritual treatment. Penny's down in Baja with her mum. They're both having out-of-body experiences on the beach to treat their depressions."

Was Penny still depressed about being infertile, I wondered, or had something else laid her low?

"Well," piped up Rose, hoping to change the subject, "we went to see The Pa.s.sion of the Christ, and one thing that really jumped out at me is that Jesus appears to have invented the dinette set."

Everyone stared at Rose. The Pomeranians snuffled and panted, out of synch with Ella Fitzgerald, who sang on the CD player.

"I don't know what historical sources Mel Gibson was basing his sets on," Rose continued, adjusting the sleeves of her gray silk shirt, "but there's a scene in the film where Jesus shows his mother how he's made a table. For all the world, it's a dinette set. It's interesting, I think, that he was a carpenter, and yet that is never talked about in the Bible."

The force of Kate's eye-roll almost threw her off balance. "I believe the film was attempting to portray Jesus's suffering, not his furniture design."

"Well, you have a point there," said David, raising his bourbon as if in toast. His tone was poised on the knife's edge between flippant and sincere. Slick, rich guy in that soft Italian wool suit and subdued gold tie. Always juuuust-have I imagined it?-on the verge of bursting out laughing.

"Well, for Heaven's sake," said my mother, "I don't know why this Mel Gibson is taking everything so seriously, after making his fortune in dog comedies."

"In what, Mum?" I asked.

"In that series of movies," she replied, swishing the ice in her drink, "Bad Max, or what have you."

Purposefully or not, and one could never tell with my mother, she had defused the tension, for Kate, Rose, David and I all had to laugh.

"Dinner!" announced Svend, blowing into the room with his arms spread wide. He was very tall, and commanded people through sheer height. His outfit was less charismatic, as he wore navy-blue dress pants hemmed too short, with red sports socks and Adidas. Apparently, this was Yard Work Wear, which doubled in a pinch as Birthday Dinner Fashion. Knowing Svend, he'd just completely lost track of time out there in the backyard, unwrapping the burlap from his bushes.

We filed into the dining room, whose walls-painted aubergine-were covered in framed collages. Each one had a little card beneath noting the t.i.tle and materials, the way they do at art galleries. "Autumn Tempest. Shredded wool on baseboard." Or: "Artist Self-portrait. Hair, felt and tinsel on drawer-lining paper." I couldn't entirely see the resemblance to Rose, but I suppose it was meant to be more a reflection of her self-image than what she actually looked like.

Chairs sc.r.a.ped out, gla.s.ses clinked, and David saw fit to toss out one more comment about The Pa.s.sion of the Christ.

"Really, I just want to add about that Gibson movie, that it blows my mind how many people willingly file into theaters to sit through violence just because it's got Christ's stamp of approval."

"Well, n.o.body knows what Jesus would have thought of it," I said.

"He sure ain't gonna turn down the new converts it brings," retorted David, with that pseudo-folksy sarcasm of his.

"Religious belief is a cognitive virus," Svend offered cheerfully as Rose handed him a plate of peas and ham and gestured at the silver serving bowl she'd managed to fill with less than a cup of mashed potatoes for all present. More scotch?

"What do you mean it's a cognitive virus? That is a totally asinine statement," said Kate, narrowing her eyes at her father. "You're so in denial."

"Well, that's-I don't find that a fair statement, Katie," Svend responded, hunkering down to his spartan dinner. "I think we can agree that religion has ignited more wars than not, created more harm than good."

Kate grew as tense as a leopard about to pounce across the table. "You are so stunningly shallow on this subject," she growled. "What about Mother Teresa, and Jean Vanier, and Ignatius Loyola and ... and ... there has just been case after case of a spiritual person enn.o.bled to do good, to set the example that everyone has followed, in how to care for the poor, and for animals, and how to be kind and judicious, and it's just so b.l.o.o.d.y convenient for you to dismiss them as having some virus, and then focus on how religion drives war."

David, nursing his fourth bourbon, if I'd counted correctly-and now I was really wondering what had depressed Penny-interrupted before Svend could reply. "Okay, okay," he said. "Hold it for a second, Kate. Let's try to understand what everybody's talking about. Svend, I've never quite got what your argument is. Basically, it sounds like you're saying, never mind St. Augustine and Mohammed, and Christ and like, Tolstoy and Confucius and Buddha and their yackety-yack. The deal went down like this. Over our five million years of brain development as a species, at some point, for no particular reason, a mutant gene within an ape's brain enabled that particular ape to believe fanciful s.h.i.t that was wholly unanch.o.r.ed in the observable facts."

Svend nodded and David nodded back, then took a fueling sip of bourbon. "So, this mutation led to a particular species of deluded ape that eventually triumphed over all of the other, more pragmatic apes, who did not believe in fanciful s.h.i.t, because the deluded ape didn't care if he died, and all the other apes did. Like, if he got eaten by a lion, so what? There was an afterlife. Cool. Meanwhile, the pragmatic apes were busy saving their b.u.t.ts, and yet they didn't survive."

David stabbed a pea with his fork, lifted it to his mouth, chewed contemplatively. "Instead, the fanciful and deluded apes managed to promote their genes, because they were more able to adapt to the fact that a sabre-toothed tiger was about to crack open their skulls for a snack, and c'est la vie. It's G.o.d's will. Is that it?"

We all found ourselves staring at Svend, as blank and expectant as students in a cla.s.sroom.

"Being religious might be a valuable adaptive strategy," he lectured, dabbing at his mouth with a linen napkin, "because it lets us minimize the fear of death, and relax. Concentrate on building and fighting. But you see why people become addicted to it."