Again I hear a noise outside the tent. An interloper gropes through the tent flap, and as I’m about to slash at him I glimpse his face—he’s the clerk who served me and helped me listen to the chansonnier Gilles Vigneault, and then held me in a vice-like grip at Archambault’s music shop. This fellow slithers into the tent on his belly, mud streaked all over him.

“Do you recognize me now, Jimmy?” he says.

I know he is talking about a time before Archambault’s. And I remember now that he is always the soldier who comes after me here, that he is another young man whom Sophie helps. I look at his tattoo and remember how to decipher its arabesque calligraphy, but this does not mean I can tell you his name.

“Jimmy always imagines he’s the only one,” Sophie says.

When I slip behind the tent to recover my medicines I take a last look at Sophie’s walrus, whose form, lit by the park lamps, is opaque when viewed outside the canvas, as opposed to transparent inside. I have not looked closely at the walrus from out here before. I incline my ear to his head and listen somewhat pathetically to see whether he does not have some wise message of farewell. His face moves and I realized it’s Sophie’s face I see pressed against the fabric from the inside.

She aligns her eyes with the walrus’s and mouths, Listen to your own goddamn animals.

—

THE RAIN DOESN’T LET UP as I make my way down to Saint Catherine Street, checking the spines, fabric and handles of last night’s umbrellas discarded in the trash bins.

There’s always a good reason an umbrella has been abandoned, but a few still look promising. It’s a mercy nobody knows me as I try out the trashed frames: I triumphantly glide a ring up its pole only to have the silk wheel float off and sail into a lamppost.

At Casse-Croûte Diane, where we have agreed to meet, Harold listens to me with a curious, crackling reception—as if knitting needles were a kind of radio antennae.

Outside, tied to a pole, is his golden dog.

“I’m still not sure I want to hitchhike,” I begin. “And you’ve brought Veronica?”

I have my pack containing water, apples, a couple of tins of beans, last night’s letter from JW in Quebec, my envelope of papers from Madame Blanchard, and my extra underwear. After our Breakfast Special Number 4 we walk past Gare Centrale—we’ll soon reach Victoria Bridge and after that the clover-leafs and the non-pedestrian nightmare of overpasses and turnpikes where Harold seems cheerfully prepared to lift his thumb.

“Veronica will be an asset, not a liability, you’ll see.”

“I don’t know if I can stand the noise and the air whistling off transport trucks….”