“Right.” He looks into space. “A lot of people think there is more danger and violence, more lack of safety in the world than there really is. I know that I had a terrible experience when I was a child, but, since then, I’ve found people, on the whole, to be extremely kind and willing to help. I’ve hitchhiked in five countries over fifteen years and never once felt unsafe—well, maybe once, but it was nothing serious, and I had a talk with the person and we reached a place of safety quite easily.”

I think of all the missing hitchhikers on the news, decapitations and rapes, victims buried alive along roads to and from nowhere. I feel tempted to point out that maybe he has no fear because he is quite a large man…but Harold is such a not-man—so open and soft I fear if I point out his size or his maleness he might weep. “What would you do,” I say, “if you got in a car and found it unsafe? If you felt you were vulnerable?”

“You mean if the driver turned out to be dangerous?”

“Yes.”

“…I’d do the same thing I do in any situation, whether the person I’m with seems bad or good. I don’t look at who the person has become. I look at everybody as if they are the same, because they are, in a way, to me at least. Bad or good. Rich or poor. Male or female. It doesn’t matter.”

“Everyone? Millionaires? Bullying tycoons? Thieving corporate bosses? Torturers?” I want to add things. Many things I have seen or done. There is no end to the butchery and cruelty I’ve been a part of. I suspect Harold is aware of this.

“All of them,” he says. “Even the man who raped me when I was little.”

“You look at them how, exactly?”

“They were all babies once. I look at them as babies.”

“No matter what they’ve become?”

“No matter what. I babify them.”

Part IV: Green Man

21 JW’s Letter

JW

Hôtel Le Priori

Rue du Sault-au-Matelot

Québec City

SEPTEMBER 8TH, 2017

Dear James, or perhaps, dear Jimmy…

May I call you that?

Yesterday I took the train from Montreal to Quebec City. As you can see from the letterhead here, I’ve booked a room at Hôtel Le Priori, a chic little place near the funicular in Quebec’s lower town, with exposed brick and a brushed metal sink shaped like an ice cream cone. There is an air freshener in the hallway that I had to surreptitiously quarantine.