But it was these sombre Turks who would run amok one day. As we sat together in the meteorology theatre during our current-affairs classes, watching the propaganda newsreels and the endless VD films with their demonstrations of how to soap and wash the male genitalia after intercourse, I expected the Turks to seize all the weapons in the armoury and slaughter the English-speaking world to a man.

“Tell the Turks?” I reflected. “That might not be good for the nerves. I don’t want to wake up and find my testicles inside my mouth.”

“I’m glad you’ve still got testicles, dear sport. It’s Friday night and we’re heading for the Iroquois.” David took a sip from his bottle, scarcely bothering to disguise it from a Canadian instructor who walked past. “Hard cheese on Artvin. He didn’t make it to Mother Russia after all.”

“I don’t think he was trying. He didn’t defect to the Soviets.”

“So what was he doing?”

“He was flying home. He’d had it here.”

“Well, he didn’t get very far.”

“Far enough.”

“Jim?” David was about to hand me the bourbon, but put the cork into the bottle. “What did that mean? I can see the Lunghua look in your eye.”

“There’s no Lunghua look.”

“Artvin’s sitting upside down in fifteen feet of iced water. That isn’t flying home.”

“It’s a figure of speech—people create their own mythologies.”

“You should have sung more madrigals. Never mind, we’re off to the Iroquois tonight.” David steadied himself against me. Completely sober for a fleeting moment, he said: “When you fuck Yvette and Brigid, promise me you’ll think of Miriam…”

*   *   *

Four hours later I lay on a bed in the Iroquois Hotel, my hands gripping the candlewick bedspread. The room rotated around me like a slowly precessing gyroscope. Beyond the room a larger carousel circled in a clockwise direction, carrying the elderly hotel and its shabby ceilings, the noise from the bar downstairs, the streets of Moose Jaw with their filling stations and hardware stores, and beyond those the snow-covered fields and the old bison slumbering by the railroad creek in their overcoats of wallows mud. For some reason I was at the centre of this rotating system, which had begun to tilt, as if banking into a power dive. I was flying the world …

“Jim, are you still with us?” David was calling to me through the glare of the bedside lamp. “Oh my God! Don’t look at him…”

I was trying to open the pillowcase, needing desperately to be sick. My trousers lay on the floor beside the bed. Too dazed to think, I vomited into them. Tears welled from my nose and eyes as shreds of turkey and bourbon streaked with blood lay inside the vent like a rancid haggis.