Abby Weiss stood up with a foot-long rose-bush branch in one hand and a pair of hedge trimmers in the other. She looked as if she had been slapped with a glove. Her straw hat was crooked and her 1993 Folk Fest T-shirt had ridden up, revealing her fifty-eight-year-old abs. "Did you just say you love me?"

"I did."

"But you never..."

"I just did."

"Well, frick." Abby's eyes glistened and she dropped the hedge trimmers and the rose-bush branch and baby-walked to Madison. They hugged on the warm front lawn, with the laughter and provocations and tinking gla.s.ses of nearby restaurant patios audible about them. "That made my day, sweetheart. It really did."

Madison squirrelled out of her mother's grasp. "Get back to your roses."

"Gladly." Abby wiped her tears with the Folk Fest shirt. "Gladly."

Her mother returned to the rose bushes and Madison hunched over the annuals bed again, digging deep into the soil with a decommissioned screwdriver. It was her job to battle the seemingly endless white roots of dandelions. She reached to the bottom of a particularly nasty one and heard a large vehicle apply its brakes. On her knees, she saw one white van and then another in front of 10 Garneau. Without a word, both Madison and Abby dropped their tools and hurried to the sidewalk.

A small team of men and women in matching blue uniforms resembling hospital scrubs emerged from the vans with a variety of indoor and outdoor implements of improvement: buckets, sponges, mops, bleaches, rakes and shovels, garbage bags and touch-up paints in appropriate colours.

Abby approached two deeply tanned men who stayed outside while the rest of the team went in the front door. Stunned and feeling oddly violated, the way she had felt on Monday night when Jonas slipped her VISA card into the door jamb, Madison hung back on the sidewalk.

"Lovely to see you," said Abby.

The two men looked at one another.

"What are you people doing here?"

Now that Madison had grown used to the idea that Jeanne and Katie were in Mexico or Calgary, that Benjamin Perlitz had died in a pool of his own blood in the master bedroom upstairs, she was beginning to accept 10 Garneau as it was. Madison realized, on the sidewalk, as a cloud of tiny bugs formed over her head, that she had been taking a sort of secret pleasure in the tragedy; the sort of pleasure she once took in muscle injuries after cross-country ski races.

The whole city had been implicated in the death of Benjamin Perlitz, just as it had been implicated in the murdered policemen, the thirteen-year-old girl found dead on the golf course, the Somali cab driver stabbed and stuffed into his own trunk, the pregnant wife beaten to death and abandoned in a ditch. The whole country and culture had been implicated. Yet this particular horror wasn't just local. It was next door. Jeanne Perlitz was her gardening friend. Once, when she had locked herself out of the house, Jeanne had come into Madison's bas.e.m.e.nt suite and they'd watched a cooking show together. Madison had babysat Katie several times, while Jeanne and Benjamin went to the theatre, the opera, the ski hill in Whitemud Creek.

This was Madison's special horror. It bestowed certain rights upon her. The right to feel victimized, to sulk dramatically, to surf the Internet for something more substantial than crib prices. How could these people in stiff blue cotton uniforms bleach, rake, mop, and shovel it away?

15.

the block party.

Soon, the sidewalk in front of 10 Garneau was congested with the curious. Shirley Wong and Abby Weiss insisted on filling a cooler with German beer and Costco pop. David Weiss suggested pizza and Raymond Terletsky agreed it was a brilliant idea, as long as pepperoni and mushrooms were involved.

It took several minutes for Jonas Pond to appear, his short brown hair twirled by the pillow. He stood next to Madison and yanked her ponytail. "Toot toot. So is there an exorcism going down or what?"

"It's four in the afternoon. Did you just wake up?"

"Don't judge me, woman."

"Did you just wake up?"

"I had a rehearsal last night, absolutely gruelling, for a two-hander aboutyou guessed itcoming out of the closet. What we really have to do is ban stupid people from getting theatre degrees. In fact, let's set up checkpoints at all roads leading into Old Strathcona and downtown. That way..."

"They're in the house."

"Who are?"

"Cleaners."

"What house? This house?"

"You know what, Jonas, maybe you should grab another fourteen or fifteen hours of shut-eye."

"Are those men Bolivian? The ones picking up the garbage?"

"I have no idea, but they only speak Spanish. Abby tried to get some info from them, but all they can do in English is apologize."

"Well, at least they're adapting to Canadian culture." Jonas shook his arms, rolled his shoulders, and initiated a mouth-stretching exercise: "Pah-Teek-Hah. Pah-Teek-Hah. Joowish. Joowish. Kansas City Rollers. Boooomtown." Then he started up the gra.s.s to speak to the workers.

"What's he doing?" said David Weiss, who sat in a lawn-chair with Garith on his lap. He had just returned from playing eighteen holes at the Mayfair with a party donor. "Does he know those guys?"

"He's practising his Spanish."

"That seems inappropriate."

Madison shrugged.

"Sit down, have a beer. It really strips some of the macabre out of this."

"I don't want a beer, Dad."

"Hey, you love beer. Come on. Tell your old man a story."

Madison watched the women moving rhythmically behind the upstairs window. It took two of them to mop the wood floors. On the night it happened, she hadn't been able to see Benjamin up there with the gun. It was too dark, and the tactical unit kept everyone back. Residents of the Garneau Block weren't allowed to be in their houses, so they huddled behind roadblocks with the media and local bystanders, drinking Sugarbowl coffee and trying to hear what Benjamin was screaming out the window.

The last Fringe play of the festival had been earlier that evening, and afterward she and Jonas had sat in the Casa Radio Active tent drinking with a table full of actors. Since she had been nursing a cranberry juice, the compet.i.tion for speaking time and attention between the drunken performers had been almost too much to take, so she daydreamed about her baby. Names she might give him or her, and whether or not she could afford one of those running strollers with the big mountain-bike tires.

When Jonas lost the ability to deliver a coherent sentence that Sunday night, she helped him up and they started home. Four blocks away, with the flashing lights visible behind the Garneau Theatre, it was obvious something had gone wrong. Madison's first worry was that her parents were dead. A break-in, a fire, a violent left-wing reprisal against David Weiss.

They reached the roadblocks as fast as Madison could drag the stumbling, mumbling Jonas, and the policewoman guided them to a safe place to wait out the ordeal. Madison was pleased to see her parents and Jonas was pleased to see a soft patch of gra.s.s. Luckily, one of the ambulances had several extra woollen blankets. Madison covered him up.

So what did they know? They knew that Benjamin, who Jeanne had kicked out, was back in the house. They knew he was drunk and raving and that he had a gun. What was he thinking? Well, no answers there.

Now, more than two weeks later, Jonas concluded his exploratory interview with the Latin American men working in the front yard by shaking their hands and kissing their cheeks. He reported back to Madison with a cringe.

"What did they say? Who hired them?"

"Their accent is strong, their vocabulary is quite advanced, and they talk really fast. I'm only in level two Spanish."

"But you spoke to them. In Spanish."

"I did, I did. But I opened with buenas tardes so flawlessly they must've figured I was bilingual. After the first bit I just nodded and said si, si."

"So you don't know who hired them?"

Jonas attempted to flatten the pillow swirls in his hair. "I didn't catch anything like that. But I think they're looking forward to Christmas time, and they enjoy living here in Canada." He turned around, southward, and raised his hand to block the sun. "Hey. Hey, h.e.l.lo to you!"

On the opposite sidewalk, in a suit and carrying a stiff black briefcase, stood the young Indian man from across the street. The young Indian man from across the street looked around to make sure Jonas was speaking to him. Then he waved and started up the red stone walk leading to 13 Garneau.

"Now that is a good-looking gent."

Madison nodded.

"Have you ever heard him speak? Or seen him with anyone?"

Madison shook her head.

"Do you think he's a member of India's secret service?"

"No, Jonas."

"Let's ask him right now if he wants to go on a date with you. Unless, of course, there's a language barrier."

Jonas began pulling Madison's arm. She resisted, and eventually kicked him. "Absolutely not."

"Did you see that briefcase? That means he's employed. You have to ask him out."

"Why, because I'm such a sweet catch? I'm sure he's looking for a pregnant travel agent who lives in her parents' bas.e.m.e.nt."

"Sometimes you're just miserable, Madison, and I have to say it affects your degree of attractiveness."

"You go talk to him. You can practise another pretend foreign language."

Jonas started to push Madison across the street. She was just about to get a hand free and slap his heavily moisturized face when Garith barked. The cleaners inside 10 Garneau were coming out.

16.

ma.s.sage therapy.

Raymond Terletsky didn't understand what they had all expected to learn from the cleaning crew that had been inside 10 Garneau. Surely they knew blood was nearly impossible to remove from hardwood, especially after settling in for two weeks. Had they hoped to extract some deep human truth or even Jeanne's new address from Sandi, the only person among the cleaners who spoke fluent English?

The neighbours seemed particularly disappointed when Sandi raised one eyebrow and answered their concerns with a query of her own: "Yeah, any you guys got a smoke I could b.u.m?"

Sitting on the sidewalk in lawnchairs, drinking two Heineken and talking about peak oil with David Weiss, had been somewhat comical, especially when David started quoting from the street paper. But after the cleaners drove off, when Raymond's wife and neighbours decided to have a final drink at the Sugarbowl and, according to Jonas Pond, "decompress," Raymond decided to go his own way, and his way was clear.

He needed a ma.s.sage.

The ma.s.seuse was a former student, a divorcee from Kamloops who tried a year of philosophy courses in 2001 to see if they might make her life more meaningful. Apparently, knowing a thing or two about the trial and death of Socrates, cogito, ergo sum, and the central argument in Mill's On Liberty merely strengthened her determination not to think so hard. She decided there was no shame in daydreaming about Cozumel while she pressed her palms into flesh.

Charlene the ma.s.seuse lived in a two-bedroom suite in Windsor Park Plaza, with a partial view of old Corbett Hall. Before he knew she was available, Raymond made his way westward and called her on his cellular phone.

"I don't know, Dr. Terletsky. Thursday's my TV night."

"How about I pay double."

"Why would you do that?"

"I just will. Say yes."

Charlene sighed. "Yes."

In the elevator, Raymond grew nervous. He always grew nervous in the few minutes before seeing Charlene. Though she was not beautiful or even pretty, Charlene had a focused stare and a disarming way of speaking that he knowingly mistook for flirtation. The door was open when he arrived, and Charlene had already changed into the loose, nursey white shirt and pants she wore when she worked.

Instead of saying h.e.l.lo, Charlene bit her bottom lip when he came through the door. "I was thinking."

"About what?"

"How am I supposed to fill out your receipt if you're paying me double? I bet your health plan only covers about sixty bucks an hour."

"The rest is a tip."

"You're gonna give me a sixty-dollar tip?"

"Yes. I am."

Charlene crossed her arms, tilted her head, and left him to change.

The ma.s.sage room was Charlene's second bedroom, so the sliding closet doors were mirrors. Before he covered himself with the towel, Raymond considered his naked body in reflection. To live authentically, says Heidegger, we must learn to confront death. We must welcome it here, alone before the mirror, in the jam-and-jelly scent of our aging skin. We must appreciate that despite our broad consciousness, despite our instinctual specialness, we were born to die.

Heidegger's secular update of Kierkegaard's leap of faith produces a deep and irrevocable transformation in anyone who manages to make it. In front of the mirror, relatively certain he had made the leap, Raymond comprehended the totality of existence. Then he grabbed the loose flesh around his waist and wished beyond wishing that he could just slice it off with a butcher knife.

Charlene knocked. "Ready?"

"Ready."

The shades were down and the lights were low, the miniature fountain tinkled and The Goldberg Variations played on the tiny stereo in the corner. Charlene didn't speak as she worked, which made Raymond think naughtier thoughts than he might have if she'd chatted about her parents or her fear of squirrels. With her slippery fingers digging into his back and thensweet daisyhis front, Raymond had to work like an Egyptian slave to maintain decorum.

Then, remembering Heidegger, he relaxed. He was born to die. This was an opportunity for adventure, and he really didn't have that much time left. If he wasted this, he would waste everything.

"Charlene."

She said nothing.