"No," said Kate, glaring, "I don't see."

"Oh, come now," murmured her father, ducking his head as he sawed at a tidbit of ham, "we all know that religion has a palliative effect, like scotch, or s.e.x-" and here he shot a sidelong glance at Rose, who looked down at her plate and blushed. "Belief numbs the pain of having evolved an awareness." Svend scanned the table with his bright, dark eyes. Was he not right, was this not obvious?

My mother simply shrugged, sipped from her winegla.s.s, said, "Where I am, death is not. Where death is, I am not." She dismissively flicked crumbs from her slacks. "Why be afraid of death when you will never be conscious of it?"

"Oh, come on, Mum," I protested, "That would work like a charm if you were unexpectedly shot in the back of the head, but what if you fell off a cruise ship, or something, and bobbed around in the water for several days, calling and calling until you drowned?"

"For Heaven's sake, Frances," she said. "Where do you come up with these scenarios?"

"All I'm saying is that the incalculable variable of having time to think, oh here I am, dying, tends to foil your equation, Mum. It's not like people have walked around for millions of years singing 'Happy day! I'll never be acquainted with death, not to worry, best just to carry on roasting the mammoth leg and que sera, sera.'"

"You are such a goof," said David, smiling his infuriatingly patronizing big brother smile.

"I am not a goof," I said, and then beamed a further message at him with my eyes: You Idiot Pompous Drunk. "I'm simply saying, David," a.k.a. Idiot Pompous Drunk, "that the human race hasn't just been generation after generation of fiercely a.n.a.lytical, turtlenecked Scots, like Mum."

At this, I dropped my eyes to my plate, and found myself worrying less about my mother's reaction to this insult than the prospect that I had accidentally bolstered Svend's argument, for suddenly I really deeply hated what he was saying.

"We have seen from research," Svend carried on, as if rejuvenated, "that Moses, St. Paul and Mohammed were epileptics. Their brains-which is to say, their neurons-were misfiring. They triumphed over disability by turning their experience into a prerequisite for human advancement."

"You have no idea what you're talking about," Kate hissed, pushing away her dinner plate for emphasis. "Look at what you're saying. You're basically announcing with your work that you know how a television functions, and then concluding that everything we see on TV is coming from within the TV itself. You've figured out the mechanism! Oh look! It's the brain, it's the TV. It's a thing. Everything to you is just a thing."

My uncle shrugged, still smiling. "The existence of G.o.d is basically irrelevant to what happens in my laboratory. There could be a G.o.d, but it has nothing to do with why people see visions. That is all the magnetic field, and I've shown that, in my work."

"Oh," Kate cried, unhinged, "you're being such a pig! Don't you see that? What you're showing, it's like understanding that the reason we cry is because we have tear ducts. Is that why we cry?"

And here Rose made her fateful mistake, inviting the rude impact of hand-fashioned napkin ring to her cheekbone by interceding between father and daughter. "This is just a theory, Kate," she ventured, "it's nothing to ... to ..."

WHACK.

"Oh!" my mother said, abruptly standing. "For Heaven's sake."

Rose did not run tearily from the room. She merely sat there dabbing at the reddening welt on her cheek with her napkin through the curtain of her hair. But Kate most certainly ran off, howling into the hallway, setting off the Pomeranians, her birthday party in ruins.

I got up to follow her, kissing everyone quick goodbyes, and ushered her into my car. We drove off in stormy silence as she wept beside me and I zoomed around in special Rosedale circles, cornering the same wet lawns beneath a cold rain until Kate finally gave up sobbing long enough to irritably direct me out of the maze.

When I got home, I found my father and my son asleep on the couch, with Curious George lying open between them, and a world of quiet wonder still intact.

"You don't have to do this, Kate."

"Yes, I do," proclaimed my cousin, with a mirthless smile.

We were in her car this time, her cherry-red Honda, paid for by all her work declaring men to be oafs and control freaks, and we were driving out to Mississauga for a rendezvous with Larry. Only, this time it wasn't me that Kate was aiming to inflame, but her father. And it wasn't rocks and blindfolds she was after. Larry, with whom she had kept in touch, was now doing a booming business in the home manufacture of MDMA. Somewhere along the line, as Kate explained it, Larry had decided that the original shamans of the world were correct to have journeyed on drugs. But he didn't favor psychotropics, which he felt required an advanced level of experience. He declared them too powerful for the ritually uninitiated who attended his beginner workshops, particularly after one attendee took peyote and, instead of lying there blindfolded and listening to the beat of Larry's drum, wandered into the closet beneath the stairs and began drawing patterns in the kitty litter. Larry found this sort of behavior unproductive, and decided to experiment with Ecstasy, which proved a great success.

"You can't do this," I repeated to Kate. "You're a lawyer. You cannot spike your father's scotch with Ecstasy. I mean, you know that."

"Frannie," Kate answered exultantly, tossing her head, "if there were a law that forbade my father from stimulating the brains of innocent U. of T. students and tricking them into a near-death experience, then I would agree with you. But if he can do that, and I can't do this, then the law is an a.s.s. Besides," she added, glancing into her rearview and executing a sharp turn onto Sunny Day Crescent, "if you think that Svend would publicly admit to having been on drugs in order to disbar his own daughter, then you don't know him."

"Do you mind if I wait in the car?" I asked.

While Kate went into Larry's house on her dubious mission, I sat in her Honda and pondered the latest O'Sullivan column, which I pulled out of my bag, unfolded, and read on my lap. This week, he had written that conservatives operated on the basis of fact, whereas liberals ran around being sensitive and touchy-feely. "Socialism doesn't work and this is a fact," he had written. "But Liberals can't deal with facts. Facts make them scream like girls. They just want everyone to have a cozy blanket of socialist health care because it's a 'nice' thing to do. Then they panic when they don't have enough money, and pay for their socialism by raising taxes on those of us who work for a living and can afford our own hospital bills."

Oh, good Lord. What a guy that Sherman was. I worked "for a living" too, didn't I, rectifying his lapses in grade-five grammar while he bowled for breast-access, but n.o.body gave me benefits. Just the other day, Avery had to sell his first-edition volume of Thackery's Vanity Fair to pay for two root ca.n.a.ls and some bridge work. Those of us. What a goof. I had seen this before, this attack on liberals for being "nice," in the newly militaristic postSeptember 11 age, where niceness was near to unG.o.dliness. The worst insult conservatives could throw at a public figure was this business of being "nice," which secretly meant, a wishy-washy patsy.

All these characterizations-"nice," "flip-flopping," "liberal"-apparently acted as code for unmanly. Although cops and firemen could be nice, they were never publicly labeled "nice." They were manly men who could tell when a murderer had murdered someone, or a house was on fire. I realized this after scrutinizing a s.e.xy picture spread that Hilary showed me of cops and firemen that had been published in Washington Wives. Decidedly absent from this pictorial, called "Heros of 9/11," were the foreign-aid workers, medics, journalists and priests who had also been killed. Perhaps their s.e.xy bravery was canceled out by their odious idealism. Whatever the reason, I never saw them included in glossy neo-con hero p.o.r.n.

At the same time, I might add-rehearsing my tirade in Kate's car, staring absently out the window with my blood pressure rising-over the years, I had met quite a few nice cops and firemen, and "nice" was actually the first thing that sprang to mind about them. They were kind. Earnest. Often distressed by human nature, but astute and experienced about its complexities. And when they did see the world in black and white, Mr. Sherman O'Sullivan, for them it wasn't an enn.o.bling picture. According to my mother, who had counseled several "front-line workers," the descent into a black-and-white worldview quickly turned them into drunks.

Gripping the column in my lap, I thought of Bernice in her d.i.n.ky hospital with its J-Cloth food and its doctors so overworked that they couldn't keep their files straight, and wondered how Sherman could believe that she didn't deserve the bed she slept in. What did she deserve, then? What plea did she need to make for her bed? Sorry we're poor and nice. We try not to be poor. We work on being b.l.o.o.d.y-minded. We pray every night that G.o.d will transform us into self-satisfied goons who wish to run the world, but he doesn't hear our prayers.

I flipped back to the first page, and began erasing the penciled-in punctuation marks I'd made. Then I started over.

"Conservatives are grounded in fact? Because something like government-provided 'socialist' health care is a nice thing to do. Even though it ends up increasing taxes on those of us who 'work' for a living."

That sounded better, I thought.

There was a thump on the roof of the car as Kate hit it with her fist, before swinging open her door and hopping in, tossing back her luxuriant hair.

"A success?" I asked.

"Time to party!"

She practically did a wheelie as she zoomed the car around the cul-de-sac and tore out of the suburbs en route to her weird misadventure.

"Oh s.h.i.t, I still could use the extra cash," I muttered as Kate roared along the QEW.

"What's that you said, Frannie?" she asked, smiling.

"Pray for me, Kate," I answered. "I'm about to lose a gig."

33.

"Do the cells in my body like me?"

Of course, Lester has to ask me this at ten-thirty at night, when I am fed up with his wakefulness, frustrated beyond measure that I am missing CSI: Miami, and am instead lying ramrod straight on his lower bunk like an astronaut in a sleep capsule, biding my time until someone in the room loses consciousness.

"They ARE you," I a.s.sure him.

"Because I like them," he offers.

"But, so, what do you think of as 'I'?"

He reflects on that. "Is my soul in my brain, then? Like, my brain tells everything else what to do?"

"You could think of it as your soul being the driver of a car," I allow, trying to correct my voice so that it sounds maternally peaceful rather than howlingly petulant, "which is the body. If the car broke down-remember how our Buick broke down last summer? We didn't die, did we, just the car did. We got out of the car, and got a new one. It's sort of like that."

He considered this. "How big is my soul?"

Aaaargh, relentless.

"Go to sleep," I tell him. "It's far too late for these kinds of questions. You can ask me tomorrow morning at breakfast."

"But I can't go to sleep."

"Why not?"

"I'm afraid I'll get stolen out the window."

"You won't get stolen, that just doesn't happen."

"But that girl, Cecilia, she was stolen out of her window, remember?"

Of course I do. Her sweet little nine-year-old face on every evening newscast, her poster in all of the shop windows, parents pleading for their only child's return. The word spread on the playground, from older kids who could read the headlines, to the younger ones. The germane information that had lodged in his brain was that a sleeping child had been s.n.a.t.c.hed from her very own bed and spirited away through the window. Vanished, never heard from again. Made invisible.

"But that really, really hardly ever ever happens," I argued. "It's so very, very rare."

Still, the possibility exists. And how can I rea.s.sure him, when I am so very much like him? Was, as a child, and still am. What if there's an Ice Age? It's possible. What if my plane crashes? It might. What if there's a serial killer on the stairs? Well, it's highly unlikely, but it's happened.

Mothers used to be able to defer to a higher authority. "We cannot know what G.o.d intends." Say your prayers now, child: "If I should die before I wake, I pray the lord my soul to take."

Without G.o.d, we are stranded in a spidery web of statistical probabilities, just windmilling our little legs in the air like stuck flies.

34.

"Frannie?"

"Yes?" I held the phone to my ear and tried, at the same time, to reach my coffee mug, to no avail.

"This is Helen."

Oh. Why?

"How are you, Helen?"

"I wanted to remind you," she said crisply, "that you had actually paid for two sessions up front."

"Oh, did I?" Well, never mind, keep the change.

"Fran, if you're willing to follow up with your second session, I want to try another tack. We won't do past-life regression, I a.s.sure you. But I do think you could really benefit from hypnotherapy, and different people respond to different methods."

"Okay," I offered, because I could never say no to someone straight to their face. Aaargh. I'm such a wimp. I told myself maybe I owed her this chance to be vindicated. Once a mother, always a mother, letting people do their show-and-tell. As soon as I hung up, I began imagining ways to get out of it. My son is sick. My car broke down. I've come down with Ebola. But as the week progressed I began yearning for some measure of comfort. Calvin phoned to say that his mother had taken a turn for the worse, and his defensive emotional tone was so cold and robotic that I dreamt he was having an affair, carried on entirely by fax. My brother showed up, unannounced and weeping, to report that Penny had left him. She'd met some d.i.n.k in Baja California with blow-dried hair and wads of cash, and David's heartbreak blew my mind. I wanted to hunt her down and riddle her with bullets from an automatic rifle, my anger on his behalf was that fierce. Of course I've heard that blood is thicker than water, but I never would have believed it, if I hadn't been put to the test.

I missed Calvin, and felt more keenly his sorrow. And I missed Lester, who was packed off every day to daycare, with his toys and his snack and his inchoate sorrow.

In the end I kept the appointment with Helen, driving up to St. Clair and Yonge that Friday after dropping Lester off.

"Wait," I said, as I sank into the giant chair. "Helen, can I clarify something first?"

She nodded, seated at her escritoire, this time in a natty blue wool suit.

"I take it from our past-life regression thing that you believe in reincarnation, which would make you ... what ... a Buddhist or a Hindu or something like that?"

She smiled demurely and shook her head. "Not really, Fran, no. I've just found that this technique is helpful to many of my clients, and really, what's important is what they believe, not what I believe."

I studied her, careful. "So you don't believe in reincarnation."

"My spiritual views aren't pertinent, as long as I am properly trained and very mindful."

How odd. Relativism in service to G.o.dliness. I had a thought: "So then, before I came the first time, you thought I was a Hindu?"

She dipped her head down, embarra.s.sed. "I was under the mistaken impression that you were a Buddhist. I apologize."

We gazed at one another in vexed silence.

"The main thing," she finally said, patting her hair and stretching her shoulders back, "is I appreciate your coming back, and I do have something else that I think will work very nicely for you. I can see that you're still very tense, and I do think I can help."

I sighed and threw my head back on the chair. The truth is, I didn't mind that first bit she did, where she got me to relax to the point of incontinence. That was alright, I could do that again. It was either Helen, or an entire bottle of Jack Daniel's.

"Okay," she said, once she had expertly brought me through her ritual of relaxation and I was duly tossed flat on a beach. "Now, I want you to imagine a place. It can be any place at all, as long as it is your own, secret place. I want you to imagine every part of this place. See it. Are the walls wood, or gla.s.s? Are there many bright windows, or is it cozy and dark? What is on the floor? Is it carpeted or smooth? Is there a big feather bed, or just big cushions gathered around a fireplace?"

Gamely, I imagined a place, then several different places, and busily redecorated this way and that until I finally settled on a s.p.a.ce of sunlit gla.s.s and marble with a white, furry sort of rug on the floor. As an afterthought, I added Brad Pitt, naked.

"Are you in your secret place?" Helen asked. I fluttered my pinkie.

"Gooood. Now, remember that this is your hideaway from the world, a temple of solitude that no one can enter but you."

Reluctantly, I booted out Brad Pitt, but then a few moments later Viggo Mortensen showed up, and what could I do? I had to be polite. He lay down beside me on the furry rug and we began conversing in Elvish.

"Alright, Frannie," Helen said, "good. I want you to focus, for a moment, on your fears about climate change. Think about how you feel as you sit happily and safely in your own private s.p.a.ce."

Excuse me, do you mind? I'm lying around naked with Viggo Mortensen! Go talk to Al Gore about climate change, if you're so interested in the subject, you b.i.t.c.h!

Oh dear. I wasn't being sufficiently suggestible. Again. I wondered if I should tell her that. On the other hand, I didn't want to confess, for that would break the spell and make me surrender my imaginary sanctum. Me, sunlight, a man whose stringy, unwashed hair is bizarrely alluring, and a furry rug. A corner of heaven. I didn't want the solitude that Helen was coaxing me toward. If it was solace that I sought, then I a.s.sociated it with something other than being alone. I paired it with whispers and shared pleasure. With feeling fulfilled and serene.

This sensation of loneliness brought a wave of sadness to me as true and deep as anything I had ever felt. Minutes pa.s.sed in silence. I lay with the feeling for a long time, it seemed, and Helen, to her credit, remained motionless and perfectly quiet.

At last, after one hundred and twenty-five million years, I struggled to sit up.