“Why assume it’s a he? You’re such a BMW.” BMW is what she calls big white males. “You should be halfway to the Plains of Abraham by now. But no, Jimmy Bee is scared of the real plains. He prefers to revisit them in his imagination, all blood-stained and heroic. Is that why you’re scared of getting your paperwork sorted out as well? That it might fail to reflect your true glory? Have you any intention of getting your ass over to see Madame Bee while she even remembers you?”

“Madame Blanchard is not senile.”

“I’m just saying time’s a fox, not a centipede.”

Right! Mrs. Waugh’s strange card in my pocket lends me confidence. Touching it reminds me that it would be folly to tell Sophie about my new developments. Or the Green Spot. Or Mrs. Waugh. Or my pursuit, yesterday afternoon, of the blind man in yellow.

I ran after him through the lower shadows of those impressive buildings that form Montreal’s skyline as you approach by the Champlain Bridge: the McGill College peak and the Roccabella tower and the Marriott Hotel and all the others—so friendly-looking from a distance, huddled and inviting—but if one walks near them, they impose on you. They shut you out like a phalanx of giant judges. The man in yellow blazed through this modern urban architecture and I was drawn right behind him.

He hastened, and I realized as I followed him past the skyscrapers and down past melons and lumpy gourds spilling out of boxes in Chinatown, that the odd thing, the thing that had defied logic but which I’d been, at the window of La Bibliothèque Gabrielle-Roy, too self-preoccupied to pinpoint, was that he was without his seeing-eye dog.

I saw as he ducked in Rue de la Gauchetière that we were about to return to our old common ground, the shower room at the Y.

I missed that dog of his.

The fact that he took his dog to the Y had been a warm spot in my wanderings. I liked watching him operate with the dog’s help. I loved how the dog waited for him, alone, when he went in the hot tub or the pool. The dog was a beacon of mute loyalty and now, with it gone, the yellow man threatened to become like all other men, walled-off and separate. If, as it now appeared, he could see, then I would not be able to spy on him anymore. I realized I’d liked doing this, much as I liked looking at bodies naked in the change-room and nearly naked in the pool. I liked to think my gaze was benevolent. When a man is blind can he tell you’re looking at him? Does he know you’re watching and feeling, in that one-sided glance, a connection with humanity otherwise estranged?