“Augustine left,” says a lad, dark-haired and painfully thin. “I just replaced him for the three o’clock shift.”

The place is quiet after the midday rush and the lad takes a moment to open the trash bins and poke around with a spatula then a pair of tongs and even a broom. He wants to help but can’t see my box in the bin: perhaps the bin has been emptied into one of the six Dumpsters out back?

I cannot bring myself to tell this boy, whose nametag bears the name of Jesus’ earthly father, that my box contained beloved human remains.

“It’s all right,” I lie. “I’m fine. It’s—thank you.”

Outside I gulp a breath of rain and diesel. A pigeon cocks its head beside a puddle.

“The box did not really contain Madame Blanchard,” I tell it.

Pigeons have eyes the colour of beer bottles. They have red, wrinkled, rubbery toes, three pointing forward and one in retreat.

“Her soul had already departed….”

Her soul and her body have both departed: Three weeks ago, Madame Blanchard became smoke that floated above the city and now travels beyond it over the trees and fields and rivers and other pastoral features that ring Montreal. She has gone up into the air and become cloud.

The pigeon flies up into the letter O of Jean Coutu drugstore and settles comfortably among the pigeon-dissuading spikes someone has installed.

I have been unforgivably negligent—my heart thumps at the bottom of its cage—but strictly speaking I have not spoiled Madame Blanchard’s flight out of this life. That flight began with her death, or perhaps it began with the burning of her remains. The ashes, I tell myself, were secondary.

Still, I feel so ashamed I can’t return to the tent before stopping in at Les Ancêtres on the corner. I no longer drink to medicate my sorrows as a rule, but it takes me several pints and a fair amount of hard stuff to numb the self-recrimination.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 8.

NIGHT.

Mont Royal. Montreal, Quebec

IN THE NIGHT, I WAKEN Sophie and beg her to return me to my mother.

“It’s simple hypnosis, Jimmy Bee,” she says, not unsympathetically this time. “I’ve told you how to do it yourself.”

“C’mon, Soph. Without you I can’t even find the doors.”

I shut my eyes. Following Sophie’s directions, I will descend hills and stairs until I reach the series of doors, all different colours. I’ll choose one and walk through it, and slowly she will have me look up to see one of my ancestors. I regard Sophie’s procedure as auxiliary to my own memories—when she puts me under I’m as if concealed on a theatrical stage, unnoticed by the actors.