Sophie is strange about money. She wants and doesn’t want it. She’s one of the few Mission staff given her own room separate from the dorms that house hundreds of homeless men, but she refuses to sleep there unless it’s twenty below outside. She recoils from people who live in park-side apartments with elegant balconies overhanging the boulevard. Yet woe betide me if I’m a day late with her rent. Over the past ten Septembers she has kicked me out of the tent early more than once, due to my precarious funds.

In the eleven autumns I’ve known Sophie, I have slowly come to suspect that my own destiny in New France might be that of a street person, much like her: constantly on the move, sleeping where the daily battle warrants, forever dreaming of stealing a fortnight in a proper bed, yet—if that opportunity approaches—realizing I’ve become fit only for our ramshackle nest under the sky, which she reminds me I’m lucky to have.

I fear being homeless might render me aimless like the men slouching on the Mission steps, smoking Pall Malls they buy from Kahnawake.

“How can they hang around so purposeless?” I once asked Sophie.

“They’re like the pigeons you’re so fond of. Hanging around the sidewalk, letting time go by. And hopefully they make it through the day.”

“I can’t see how they can stand it. Surely it’s a misfortune not to have an employment or a profession of some kind or other, to fill up the intervals of our time….”

“Spoken like a real military man.”

“But…to live merely for the sake of eating, drinking, without the prospect of any business, or of being useful. That, in my mind, is a heavy condition.”

“Isn’t that attitude precisely what gave General Wolfe all his troubles?”

Sophie has an unerring instinct for magnifying every misgiving I have ever entertained about my life’s work. She holds my military career up to me as if it were a mirage that I now have a chance to see anew. And even as she does this, she gets so impatient with me.

She says I refuse to gain perspective, that I’m too invested in my crimes: still needing to make sense of them, to justify my butchery.

“You can’t see the forest when you’ve torched all the trees,” she taunts.

If only it were just trees we burned.

Dear Mother,

We set fire to so much more…

—

GOD, I NEED TO GET out of Place d’Armes—the place makes me depressed. But…to journey to the third circle!

Must I go?

Catacomb of alienation!