Brake

by Gregory Spatz

From Fiction Number 66 (2023)

Photo: "Français : Auto-stoppeur" by Yves Tessier is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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HE WOULD NOT BE the first traveler to imagine his path through the mountains, rising and falling with the course of the river below, as a tunnel cut through space and time with everything along its course fated for him to encounter: the pattern of light and shadow on his windshield and on the road ahead, the exact smattering of rain at kilometer marker 146, wind gusting at the sides of his car, the sudden splat of a dead bug leaving Cranbrook and accelerating back to his normal cruising speed. Once you’re underway, everything depends on the timing and execution of every antecedent choice and decision, and on the exact pressure through the ball of your foot against the gas pedal, the brake, and especially on your departure time. Leave a minute earlier, don’t get caught behind the red Suzuki with Manitoba plates creeping along exactly five clicks under the speed limit and the rabbit suddenly dashing from the underbrush on your right won’t tangle itself with your undercarriage. You won’t get that sickening whack as it bumps under your tires followed by the queasy apparition of writhing fur half-stuck to the tarmac in your rearview mirror as you speed along your fated way, the ineffectual jerk through your wrists as you tried to dodge the critter almost a memory, a blunt bone-jarring alarm already fading as the road unwinds reassuringly ahead . . . But what were you supposed to do? Stay home? Never go anywhere? It was all set in motion the moment you left. Like everything in life, perpetual motion until it stops, only more obviously so. Less left to choice or free will—only remaining alert and awake, watchful of the dials. Watchful of the side of the road for another rabbit or a deer or elk. Person.

He was also not the first to realize that within this flying bubble of space so singularly isolated and confronted with fate and therefore disconnected from the ordinary passage of time, the daily grind, a kind of pacific release and ecstasy was accessible. An opportunity to talk to yourself, babble in weird accents, engulf yourself in music echoing against the steel and glass. Why not? And for him, because of his lifelong dedication to music not just as an enthusiast, fan and listener, but as a professional, there was also an opportunity to practice and to reminisce—to lean into the pauses and dynamic swells, one hand or the other lifted to carve out signature metric shapes in the air, to cue the bassoons, the soloist, soften the strings, eyes and eyebrows straining to communicate, to drive them on wordlessly. Today it’s Brahms’s Third Symphony, because it’s what he grabbed on his way out the door along with a new recording of Gesualdo madrigals he’s been meaning to listen to for weeks now and somehow keeps forgetting. The radio reception’s spotty and anyway who wants to hear more alarm and worry about the virus spreading in China and the Americans going crazy less than a hundred miles south of where he’s now driving as they try to impeach or protect the lunatic in charge, he can’t keep current and doesn’t want to keep current—time for music! He doesn’t, as he always imagines he will slipping in a disc and waiting for the opening measures to well up excellently around his legs and across the dashboard, think much about his moments pre-performance and waiting offstage, or the pause as the lights dim before he strides into the spotlight and the smattering sound of applause, like rain, like butter in a pan, like nothing but itself really and never the satisfying end (or beginning) to anything you might hope it would be as he plunges across stage and onto the conductor’s stand. Instead, with the start of the allegro con brio he’s brought straight back in time through each theme’s statement and development to some old sadness and former ideal of expression or embodiment of emotion that he’d hoped to shape in the music and had had to eventually abandon (the orchestra he directs is the Okanagan Symphony Orchestra after all, not the Philadelphia Philharmonic) and with that, with each recollected compromise, each less than perfect rendering, a reminder of real days surrounding those choices and all the poignancy of time past—the weather and the players and their instruments and limitations and personalities and tensions. All the little dramas and failures along the way.

And because the subconscious mind is a tricky, subversive but ultimately bald-faced saboteur in the ways it sends random rabbits across the roadways of conscious deliberation and choice, only now, as he wends his way out of Jaffray into mountainous terrain and beyond the landscape that feels more familiar and like his own (though this is a fiction; he’s a prairie transplant) does he realize why it was this particular piece, the Brahms, that he “grabbed” for the day’s nine-hour drive. Of course. It’s the one he threw himself into for healing and respite of some kind after Maxine, because . . . well, it was all he could do for a while. A good hard piece to obsess over and be lost in rather than think about her back out on the Gulf Islands with her half-bear of a husband and their wild brood, practicing for whatever string of upcoming engagements with regional symphonies was next on her schedule—the traveling soprano—emailing with him and calling sporadically, elliptically, and finally going silent for weeks at a time. Would he ever see her again? Unclear then.

But before that, before the fizzling and uncertainty and the silence that had pushed him ever deeper into Brahms, they’d driven this exact route together. He was much cleverer then and had managed to clear things last minute in such a way that he could be her driver and assistant after her engagements with the OSO. So they could extend their few nights together in Kelowna into a week and a half traveling southeast and north until he dropped her at the Calgary airport and headed home again—the long, heartbroken drive home listening to her recordings all the way. He’d been so foolishly full of hope then, confident, and certain of some future following her around in other provinces and states. Idiot. Highway of pain, highway of sorrow, the folk musicians would probably have called it. But the drive out! What a revelation. Within the shared privacy and self-contained centrifugal force of cornering and speeding ahead through these very curves and verdant swells of tree-lined ridges, snow-topped mountains coming in and out of sight beyond the beauty fringe of deciduous and coniferous trees lining the roadside, the sunlight falling to one side of the car and the other as they crested and dropped down again through the passes, her feet up on the dash and seat angled back just so, skirt lifted and legs open so he could reach her, another kind of ecstatic release was possible. Another kind of escape velocity. Something he’d never known. How had it started? His idea or hers? He doesn’t remember. Possibly neither. It was unlike them to talk about such things (there was too much to avoid saying aloud, too much impossibility in the situation and guilt to address head on; better to avoid words and let impulse guide) except that afterward, over dinner and back to something more like normal, more public and performative anyway, she’d assured him in a way he immediately understood to be truer than most of what she said about herself and most of the ways she presented herself for him even privately, that this had never happened before. That car ride, she said. She shook her head, eyes wide, beaming, cheeks flushed again. No. Never like that.

He’s surprised and not surprised outside Fernie when the young woman materializes at the side of the road in a sudden stripe of sunlight like weather detached from earlier in the winter and stranded around her so she has to raise a hand over her eyes visor-like to see his approach. Girl, he thinks. Not a girl, he corrects himself. A young woman in her twenties. Though to be fair, at this phase of his life, approaching seventy, everyone under the age of forty seems happily and similarly childlike to him. Convinced still of their immortality and of the drama of self-purpose, self-definition, self-direction following them everywhere like a silent film crew recording and tracking their every move through the dull passage of days. No awareness yet of how fleeting and random it all might be. The mossy green muslin of her scarf is familiar and the dyed bright red of her hair in contrast with that green, pulled to her chin against the wind, not quite covering her cheek. He’s almost beside her when he sees the violin case angled against her leg, the ratty knapsack on her shoulder and by then, the choice that was already half-made feels fully made and almost beyond his control. Who, he thinks—a violinist?—even as he’s already pulling over, signal chiming, rumble strip rattling under his tires, and tires sending up a spray of gravel and dust as he brakes from 120 kph to zero and starts zigging back up the shoulder toward her. The situation is surprising because almost no one hitchhikes anymore, but also not surprising because he’d been thinking about Maxine enough that it feels as if her absence, the loneliness surrounding it and also the satisfying stasis of that loneliness—it’s stretched on for long enough to have become guaranteed, formal, halfway companionable—may have somehow caused this woman’s sudden appearance. Total bullshit, he knows. Of course. But not. Anyway, his thoughts have primed him to expect her. So, sure he’ll be the one to pull over and give her a lift. Like he was the one to hit that rabbit. He tries to imagine whether or not he really saw the bits of fluff and hair pulling themselves back from the tarmac and sprinting the rest of the way across the road, or just wished for it.

“Hey,” she says, leaning in the open door. There’s something weird about her voice—a strained quality like undertones and overtones pushing through and against one another, like rocks or an excess of breath caught in her larynx, which is at odds with the openness of her face.

“Only going as far as Fort MacLeod,” he says up at her. “Will that help?”

“Yes, it will!” There’s a smell as she swings stiffly into the seat beside him. Musty, unwashed skin, a little cloying. Hair. Clove cigarettes. Wind. Bacon? Body odor. All of this and other elements of her life on the road imbued in the threads of her clothes, unwashed for long enough that the corona of smells is indistinct, is at once unplaceable, stomach turning, and familiar to him.

“It’s very nice of you to stop,” she says. “I’m on my way to Edmonton.” It’s like she’s whispering. Mocking him? But why?

Despite his reservations and the strangeness of her voice and smell, or maybe because of these things, because he wants to prove to himself his willingness to take chances, be accepting in the intersection of fate and need and strangeness and generosity, he finds himself nodding his head, bobbing it up and down like it’s come unattached from his neck. “All righty then,” he says. “Off we go!”

She leans for the door. Her stuff she’s slung into the seat well between her feet—violin, green nylon knapsack—seems unlikely to him somehow. Discouragingly detached from her, as if it’s not quite hers, so he has to wonder a moment about this choice (though really, it’s already too late). Is it hers at all? Does she play? Is she a comrade/neophyte in need after all? For now, there’s the reassuring if somewhat embarrassing pleasure of the Saab’s engine noise through the still open door to distract him from his misgivings and move everything forward, that deep rumble, before she leans a little further, chunks the door shut. Such privilege, he knows, a car like this. Such excellent functionality. The light shifts from brilliant to shadowed, clouds speeding by overhead, a gust of wind flattening the trees at the side of the road.

He’s momentarily glad for the small rituals of rebeginning travel and self-conscious about his old-mannish mannerisms as he does—as he flips down the turn signal, studies his sideview mirror and rearview to be doubly sure, eases off the brake and makes a humming noise as he continues watching for other cars and pulls back into the travel lane a little overdelicately, shifting up and up again for more torque, straightens the turn signal, leans forward in his seat as if that will help them to gain momentum . . . He is no longer on the same trip, he realizes. This was his choice. But the rest of the drive, for better or for worse, until he drops her off, will be altered while everything outside the car probably remains exactly as it was and as it was fated to be.

“Seatbelt,” he says, glancing once at her as the alarm begins its delayed chiming. Then, “Marcus,” a hand extended for her to shake. The edges of her fingerless gloves feel crusty and soft against his skin, threads rimmed with food or snot or some other effluvia.

“Georgia.” And at once he understands. He glances again as the scarf falls away to confirm it. The voice is not a female voice. Basso profundo. Resonant. Deeper than his own and matched with a prominent Adam’s apple the ledge of which bobs once and again as she swallows and continues speaking. “So grateful you were willing to stop, Marcus. These days no one trusts anymore.” This is what she’d been concealing.

He clears his throat, conscious now of how his every next move will matter (there was a violist recently who transitioned so he has at least a little familiarity with how this goes, how to be smart and sensitive); he will be studied for reaction, judgment, prejudice, so she can know in turn—a matter of survival, he knows—how to comport herself. He glances again in the rearview mirror and glimpses his own eyes—brighter and glassed unexpectedly with liquid, the pupils constricted to dots and surprisingly inscrutable. Afraid? Worried? Nervous? But why? To counter this he smiles and turns more fully to take her in. The prominence of her jawline. The eyes framed in heavy mascara. Bright red hair. The scarf unwound from her face to show pink circles of makeup on the cheekbones and a shadow of light brown stubble elsewhere. In her expression he decides there’s no evidence that she wishes to hide or reflect awareness of the dissonances in her appearance, or really to provoke any response by way of them. There is simply her peering out of this mosaic of attributes—male and female and neither—and also he guesses, quickly, somewhere back there is an Alberta prairie family in a square vinyl-sided rancher outside Edmonton eating bland beef curry and baked potatoes; also the itchy wool necks of sweaters and wool shirts as the forced air furnace kicks on, filling the stuffiness with more hot, meat-smoked air as she tries to savor anything she’s eating. A lifelong impulse to get out, shed those woolens and the flat horizon at winter dawn with the sun leaking up red and yellow through swirling snow and wheat stubble, to become herself—and yet, despite it all, despite all the distance and time away and change, somehow never really escaping. Headed home now, he supposes. Why? Any number of reasons. Projection, all of this. But he savors it a moment, wondering as he does which elements most convince him of such a picture. Clothes? Smell and body language? Accent? The nearness of her eyes and some way that he feels drawn in, like he’s always known her? His own history? Has he actually just stuck her into his aunt Sally and uncle Fred’s house in Sherwood Park?

He bypasses all of this for the one thing they may have in common. “You play?” he asks, indicating the violin case with his chin. “On your way to a gig?” Again in the rearview he glimpses himself doing the weird, too-intense smile, like he’s baring his teeth. Again the head-bobbing.

“Oh, me, no, no,” she says. She touches her collarbone and laughs. “Transporting for a friend.” She scratches air quotes around the word. “Actually it’s kind of a long story.” She laughs again and pinches the end of her nose, making him reflect back on her gloves, the dried effluvia he’d felt rimming the finger holes in her fingerless gloves, and to wonder if she’s sick and if so with what. If he’ll find out three to four days from now when it blows up through his own head and throat. Maybe even the bug from China. She shoves the case away from her leg and shifts toward him in her seat. “But I suppose we have time.”

“All we have!” he says.

What follows isn’t so much long (though it’s that, too) as it is immediately confusing for him to follow, beginning by dropping him into a situation involving a ring of friends with names like Skyward and Monkee and Jewel and Lavender—names that seem intended to mix faux-Celtic and First Nations heritage with unpredictable shifts in plural and singular pronouns (she corrects herself once or twice on this to further confuse things—god, sorry I’m always messing that up; it’s because they don’t always care). The nonbinary person or people is probably Ju (sometimes Jewel) he decides too late, but maybe also Lavender or Sky. This is unclear because they also refers to all of them at times. Quickly it becomes, as his young nieces sometimes like to kiddingly call their attempts at communicating with him, a full-on generation gap fail. And through this telling, in the absence of being able to quite follow particulars, he becomes unhelpfully preoccupied by the tone of her voice, its rising and falling pitch, and trying to place the accent—something familiar in it to match with the eyes which are also disconcertingly familiar and the way the tip of her nose moves slightly as she speaks—to understand how her accent sometimes seems to vanish and flatten out like a straightaway descent down the back side of a mountain pass (the one they’re driving through now, for instance, lined on either side by towering pines reaching up in a way that causes the sky to reel pleasingly overhead like you’re being pitched upward instead of down, also bringing back the distant memory of Maxine’s quickening breaths beside him in that same passenger seat) and then reassert itself again in diphthongs and triphthongs, the old prairie-twang, generally when she’s speaking fastest and most energetically about the element of the story that keeps coming back around. Sky. Skyward seems to be the central player here, central villain, because of his scheming the whole time to steal money from all of the friends by overcharging on rent and then mooching off them and “literally” emptying one person’s bank account (or possibly everyone’s) at the end, before disappearing, but not before loaning Jewel the violin. By this point Georgia is in tears and using the backs of her fingerless gloves to mop and dab around her eyes and under her nose, all of which is disconcerting because he has so little idea of what she’s saying or what might be causing the tears and no way to console or offer help. “So this is theirs, like a family heirloom, right? But they betrayed us!” she says. Touches under her eyes again and apologizes for crying. “Such a mess! But I don’t think it’s very valuable or whatever. Except maybe it is. Anyway it was given to me for ‘safekeeping.’ ” Here again she scratches quotation marks in the air to signify meanings behind meanings and laughs barkingly in a way Marcus understands is meant to demonstrate their mutual understanding of something he also hasn’t grasped about that word, safekeeping, and its context and whether the violin is actually Sky’s or Jewel’s or . . . “And of course, if I can sell it, which maybe I will, then the rest of us will divide the money. But for now, I just get to keep it. Does that make sense? And what about you?”

Juan Gris, Violin and Engraving, 1913, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

All of this bramble of dramatic connections and indecipherable narrative bits is numbing enough to have put him at risk of falling asleep some kilometers back as the trees fade and high stretches of alpine meadow open around them, so he misses her question at first. Instead, coming over the rise and crossing into Alberta, the Crowsnest on one side of the highway and Mt. Tecumseh on the other suddenly standing up dramatically—a vista that always puts him in mind of the choral sections in Beethoven’s final symphony, like he’s waking up out of a prickly half-stoned opium dream—he realizes that the cop car he’d passed somewhere back before Summit Lake and which had caused him to tap his cruise control down a few notches and back up again after going around a bend, has suddenly materialized and is hovering just off his left bumper. No lights spinning, but there’s an intensity to the way it follows, hanging there too close, that informs him of an unstated purpose and intent. He looks again at Georgia and wonders.

“What about me what?” he asks.

“Do you play?”

 In the seconds that follow he has to realize that her work of figuring him out and getting it half wrong (probably) has been exactly as convoluted and ongoing as his own, and probably a lot more necessary to her survival, despite the fact that she’s hardly let up talking since she got in the car. The details she’d have absorbed—his selection of CDs visible in the console, his artsy goatee and turtleneck sweater, stylishly minimalist glasses on a beaded cord around his neck, soft briefcase covered in arts organization pins and patches in the back seat and overstuffed with scores (this she probably hasn’t seen, though she may have; with all the mascara it’s hard to say exactly where her eyes are focusing and with how much calculation)—have given her clues. Enough that she has her guesses, too, about who he might be.

“I do in fact,” he says. “Yes.” He beams and leans against both hands on the steering wheel like a begging dog. Vainglorious fool. This thought he follows immediately with his usual, go-to rationalization for any number of criticisms: Of course, but it’s a hazard of the trade. Cock, schmuck, philandering motherfucker. All things he’s been called, to his face even, and has accepted without ever exactly accepting. Tell me something I didn’t know. I’m a conductor for Christ’s sake. What did you expect? He checks his dials. Smack on the speed limit.

“With a symphony?” she asks.

“Me? No. I’m more like the kind of musician symphonies are with if you know what I mean. I direct. And today I’m . . .” But he can’t finish the thought somehow—can’t get hold of the bits about how he’s on his way to give a boring keynote address about regional arts alliances to prospective donors and board of trustee members in the hopes of helping an old friend with her latest fundraising efforts to save the old theatre there in Fort MacLeod. He’s beginning to realize that something more profound is amiss. More profound and amiss than a dead rabbit or a stray trans hitchhiker or describing a speech he’s slated to give to a bunch of sated and more than half-dead oil people in suits and dresses after a predictably dense dinner of local beef and provincial wines. Something more like a full-on rupture to the space-time continuum of this journey and his safe passage from Kelowna to Fort MacLeod.

He lifts his chin and keeps his eyes focused on the rearview mirror so she’ll follow his meaning. “But I wonder what he wants,” he says. “Awfully close don’t you think? You on the run or . . .”

And before his question is done, the transformation in the seat beside him has begun. First the hair peeled up and back and stuffed in the nylon knapsack; next the eyelashes seized delicately at the corners and yanked quickly away to reveal stubby brown-blond eyelashes matching the seal-slick head of dirty-blond hair pinned and coiled at the temples with bobby pins, also now deftly, speedily harvested in trembling fingers and hidden in the knapsack. Of course, having witnessed any number of split-second costume changes backstage in his earlier days working as a stagehand, manager, part-time percussionist, none of this is as shocking or disorienting as he supposes it might be for another driver. Unaided by any stage crew and driven by a different kind of urgency to be done, there’s still the familiar deflation and visual disembowelment and revelation about this peeling away and deconstruction—like seeing under layers and layers of paint to bare surfaces, to the foundational bare boards and scorched soil of a thing; but also in the erasure of the former artifice is a reminder of its potency and a preference (for him anyway) to think of it as the more essential and enduring truth. The bright red hair and enormous lashes. This is the reality to be believed. The Georgia to be remembered. First impressions, best impressions, he thinks. The show is always the truth, as the dress drops from her shoulders revealing underneath a skintight black T-shirt to match the jeggings he’d noticed passingly under the plaid pouf of her dress. The smell he’d detected previously when she entered the car intensifies with this activity or becomes more fully itself anyway as various items of clothing which previously muffled or blocked it vanish and are stowed away. She fluffs the hair around her temples and scrubs at it with her fingertips so it obscures and falls more evenly around the sides of her face. She rubs at her eyes and cheeks with the backs of her wrists—gloves gone now—blunting and smudging away makeup.

“What exactly—” he begins asking.

“You don’t want to know,” she says. “The less you know . . .” she doesn’t finish this thought.

In all it’s taken about a minute and a half for her to transform into this slim, black-clad, breastless woman about ten years younger than Georgia and much less charming. Much more resigned and cunning and aloof. Or just afraid.

He nods. “OK,” he says. “But what—?”

“Please just keep driving straight through town and if you could drop me as soon as we’re through Coleman I’d be much obliged.” Her voice is as breathy and layered as it had been initially, but with that is the tremor of grief held in check. She’s about to run into an ending of some kind but he can only guess what it is or what it will mean for her.

Again, he nods. But there is nothing after Coleman. There’s the little town of Frank and the hundred-year-old rockslide. Is she thinking she’ll disappear into the wilderness of boulders there somehow? Become some kind of stone nymph and live in the wild on dirt and air? Or just end her life?

“Will do,” he says.

In Coleman he passes two more cop cars at the side of the highway. And then two more. Even as they slow to a pedestrian-friendly crawl, stopping law-abidingly at every flashing walkway for people and letting the salt and sand smudged bumpers and sides of cars with more and more Alberta and Manitoba plates pull around them in the travel lane (one car he even recognizes—the red Suzuki driven by a woman in a floppy purple hat; he’d been able to pass her only after what felt like an eternity being stuck behind her dented bumper with the I Brake For Miracles bumper sticker that made him angrier and angrier the longer he was forced to see it and be unable to get around it), he knows there’s no way she’ll be able to pull this off. Georgia hunches low in her seat with her shoulder turned to the window and a hand partially lifted to obscure her face. But it’s no good. They’ve been marked already somehow and the cops are everywhere. Even before the racks of lights start swirling behind him and the sirens chirp once and again to underscore that before sending up the full throttle wail, the cruisers ahead with their lights on parked at either side of the highway, like some kind of ambush anticipating flight, he knows this is the end of her journey.

“You want me to make a run for it?” he asks all the same.

She laughs. “Your call.”

“You got a hot Strad in that case or something? A million dollars?”

“If only.”

“Body parts?”

She doesn’t answer.

“Drugs?”

She sighs and squeezes the bridge of her nose with her fingertips. Shakes her head.

“Well,” he says. “I wish I could have helped more.”

“You couldn’t,” she affirms.

He signals and pulls to the curb and keeps both hands on the steering wheel as he’s been told you should do and as he’s seen in all the recent bodycam footage and Facebook video feeds. He watches in his rearview mirror. He waits for the cop car doors back there to spring open and the Stetson-hatted RCMP to swagger up on either side of his car and start their questioning. Those ratty fingerless gloves he sees are wadded together and stuck in the cupholder beside the vent on her side and she is weeping openly, the tears carrying away whatever remains of her makeup. He wants to say something encouraging. You’ll be OK. Or, You’ll get through this. It’ll work out. One foot in front of the other. Remember to brake for miracles. But he can’t find it in himself to lie. He doesn’t know her that well.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Red and Orange Streak, 1919, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania.

On the road again and just past Frank, an hour behind schedule but wide awake for sure, more awake than he’s been in a very long time and glad for it, glad too to have finally supplanted his memories of Maxine and what they’d jokingly called the highway of orgasms all those years ago with this other drama of mystery and crime and dispossession—it fully sinks in for him that he’ll never know who Georgia was, if that was her name at all, and whether this was all her story and he just happened to stumble into it unwittingly, stopping for her because of what he thought was a violin case and because of his memories of a lover who he hasn’t seen in going on a decade now, or if it’s his story and she was the unwitting drop-in character. Or both? How can he ever know? He tries to remember the beginning of his speech for tonight. Ladies and gentlemen . . . That’s about as far as he can get. What had he finally settled on for an opening anecdote? He doesn’t remember and can’t imagine how it would be in any way adequate to the task of keeping the arts alive. Something about remembering to value the arts. The creative economy? The struggle always to find patrons and the inestimable value of their support to the artistic community (despite their uncultured idiocy and ignorance and the fact that their brand of tar-sand wealth in particular has destroyed the province if not the planet). Could he possibly rewrite it in the few minutes of downtime he’ll have before cocktails and dinner, begin with some fictionalized version of himself picking up a lost wandering solo violinist in the wilderness and stopping along the way in the mountains to hear her play, to be bowled over by her natural abilities and to offer generously some world-class coaching? Spin that into the story for tonight?

But none of this matters. All that really matters is the covid spike proteins covering her gloves and blown from the cupholder into the air to saturate his nasal passages and throat all the way to Fort MacLeod and halfway home again before he thinks to throw them away—not to mention the recycled air of hers that he’s already breathed and breathed again with her oddly wretched smell for close to an hour while she rambled about Monkee and Sky and Lavender . . . So in another week he’ll be at home again in Kelowna, asymptomatic, and leading the old peoples’ choir and then the youth orchestra and finally his beloved OSO. Three unrecorded super-spreader events, main source forever unknown. He’ll survive, of course, long enough anyway to sit in the audience and hear Maxine sing again at the arts center in Banff two years later and to stand beside her afterward at the backstage reception for patrons and administration, masked still out of habit, and to feel in the space between them that old silent frisson. All that attraction and need, and to turn away from it because . . . well, maybe they’re finally old enough to know better. And anyway isn’t it always better to leave off wanting a little more rather than burning through everything to the end? His only covid symptoms will be a runny nose. Just enough to make him wonder, but not enough to let him register the potency of infection or to guess that he’s a walking bomb. A little weariness, but not so much that an extra shot of espresso and a few nips from the brandy bottle before rehearsals can’t keep him going. And going and going.

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