IT WASN’T AS IF I’D NEVER had a lover. Still, I have never found a way to explain to Sophie how dead the strippers seemed to me. The body of the one she liked best was bright and unblemished but emanated no energy. Waxy, it held in light for itself and would not share that light. His cock bobbed and nodded, no more alive than a silicone cock on the wall in one of the sex shops down the block. My teeth have more life in them, broken as they are—at least they quicken when I run my tongue over their enamel.

Paid dancers are nothing like Elwyn. Elwyn’s lips were cut plums, bruised against his white teeth. Elwyn trembled like an aspen. His hair lay like wrens’ breast-feathers and his skin was a sheet of water entrapped with flecks of gold.

Everything about Elwyn was latent, poised and infuriating, an eyelash away from a trigger I never found.

Elwyn was tantalizing yet had no sharp centre, no wick. None of this was a function of his body, although his body and face, his eyes and his dark hair, were of great beauty.

Whereas I am ugly and pale-bellied, a beanpole, and not a bit erotic.

Saint Catherine Street beyond that club door reminded me of Elwyn.

The street at night is a place for me to hide, a mystery to visit and never plumb. It poses no obstacle to the soul. The street has a body but it quivers, full of glimmering night. It shares the glimmer and every mote sings. The spaces between the motes are vast, and in those spaces I love being lost.

Was the way I loved Elwyn due to his being a man? This is the thing Sophie insinuates. But I am not convinced of its remotest relevance.

People are so eager to annihilate the divine space that makes up the vast, greater part of love.

8 Doppelgänger

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5.

STILL MORNING.

Chinatown. Montreal, Quebec

“Regarde l’homme maigre, Maman,” cries a little boy to his mother on the avenue. “Il est comme un squelette!”

It isn’t easy to describe me, thinner now than I ever was, hard as that is to imagine. The little schoolboy’s right; I’ve become a shadow, a skeleton in motion. I have to admit my reflection in Super Dépanneur La Cité resembles a fishbone with a flame on top, wavering and insubstantial. Could I lift a stone, tie the simplest knot in a bit of string? Or am I a wandering fish-flame incapable of leaving even a breath-bubble or singe-mark behind?

“Je suis desolée….” The boy’s mama has gone pink.