“I said here,” says Billy. He pulls ,her down on top of him, zeroes in on her mouth, encircles her in his golden arms; squeezes her tight.

“The egg!” says Charis breathlessly, remembering it. The egg breaks.

XXX

That’s what Billy was like, at the time. He was always after her then. In the mornings, in the afternoons, at night, it made no difference. Maybe it was just a sort of nervousness, or boredom, because he didn’t have that much to fill up the time; or it might have been the tension of being there illegally. He would wait for her at the ferry dock and walk back to the house with her and grab her before she even had a chance to put the groceries down, pressing her back against the kitchen counter, his hands pulling up her long flimsy skirt. His urgency confused her. God I love you, God I love you, he would say at these times. Sometimes he did things that hurt—slapping her, pinching. Sometimes it hurt anyway, but since she didn’t mention this, how was he supposed to know about it?

What had she felt, herself? It’s hard to sort out. Maybe if there had been less, less plain old sex—if she had felt less like a trampoline with someone jumping up and down on it—she would have learned to enjoy it more, in time. If she could relax. As it was she merely detached herself, floated her spirit off to one side, filled herself with another essence—apple, plum—until he’d finished and it was safe to re-enter her body. She liked being held afterwards, she liked being stroked and kissed and told she was beautiful, a thing Billy sometimes did. Once in a while she cried, which Billy seemed to find normal. Her tears had nothing to do with Billy; he didn’t make her sad, he made her happy! She told him that, and he was satisfied and didn’t push her for answers. They talked about other things; they never talked about that.

But what was it supposed to be like? What would have been normal? She had no idea. Every so often they smoked dope—not a lot, because they couldn’t afford much of it, and when they had some it usually came from one of Billy’s friends—and at those times she got an inkling, an intimation, a small flutter. But it hardly counted, because her skin felt like rubber then anyway, like a rubber suit she had on with a grid of tiny electric wires running through it, and Billy’s hands were like inflated comic-book gloves, and she would get involved with the convolutions of his car or the whorl of golden hairs on his chest, and whatever her body was up to was no concern of hers. One of Billy’s friends said that there was no sense in wasting good hash on Charis because she was stoned all the time anyway. Charis didn’t think that was fair, although it was true that being stoned didn’t make as much difference for her as it seemed to make for other people.

Billy wasn’t the first man she’d slept with, of course. She’d slept with several, because you were supposed to and she didn’t want to be considered uptight, or selfish about her body, and she’d even lived with one man, although it hadn’t lasted. He’d ended by calling her a frigid bitch, as if she was doing him some injury or other, which puzzled her. Hadn’t she been affectionate enough, hadn’t she nodded her head when he talked, hadn’t she cooked the meals and laid herself down compliantly whenever he wanted her to, hadn’t she washed the sheets afterwards, hadn’t she tended him? She was not an ungiving person.

The good part about Billy was that this thing about her, this abnormality—she knew it must be one, because she’d listened to other women talking—didn’t bother him. In fact he appeared to expect it. He thought women were like that: without urges, without needs. He didn’t pester her about it, he didn’t question her, he didn’t try to fix her, as the other men had done—tinkering away at her as if she was a lawnmower. He loved her the way she was. Without anything being said, he simply assumed, as she did, that what she felt about it didn’t matter. Both of them were agreed on that. They both wanted the same thing: for Billy to he happy.

Charis lies under the sleeping bag, propped on one elbow, touching lightly the face of Billy, who has his eyes closed and may be on his way back to sleep. Maybe one of these days she will have a baby, Billy’s baby; it will look like him. She’s thought about it before—how it would just happen, without any decision or plan, and how he would stay with her then, stay on and on, and they could keep living here, like this, forever. There’s even a small room in the house where she could put the baby. At the moment it’s full of stuff—some of it is Billy’s, but most of it is Charis’s, because despite her wish not to be pinned down by possessions she has a number of cardboard boxes full of them. But that could all be cleared out and she could put a little cradle in there, with rockers on it, or a rush laundry basket. Not a crib, though; nothing with bars.

She runs her fingers over Billy’s forehead, his nose, his gently smiling mouth; he doesn’t know it, but this touching she does is not only tender, not only compassionate, but possessive. Although he is not a prisoner, he is in a way a prisoner of war. It’s war that has brought him here, war that keeps him in hiding, war that makes him stay put. She can’t help thinking of him as a captive; her captive, because his very existence here depends on her. He is hers, to do with as she will, as much hers as if he were a traveller from another planet, trapped on Earth in this dome of artificial interplanetary air that is her house. If she were to ask him to leave, what would happen to him? He’d be caught, deported, sent back, to where the air is heavier. He would implode.

He might as well be from another planet, because he’s from the United States; not only that, but from some dim and esoteric part of it, as mysterious to Charis as the dark side of the moon. Kentucky? Maryland? Virginia? He’s lived in all three places, but what do those words mean? Nothing to Charis, except that they verge on the South, a word also lacking in solid content. Charis has a few images connected with it—mansions, wisteria, and, once upon a time, segregation—she has seen movies, back in her other life, before she was Charis—but Billy does not seem to have lived in a mansion or to have segregated anybody. On the contrary, his father was almost run out of town (which town?) for being what Billy calls a “liberal,”

which is not at all the same thing as the solid, the orthodox, the bland-faced and interchangeable Liberals that appear on Toronto election posters with such stultifying monotony.

The United States is just across the lake, of course, and on clear days you can almost see it—a sort of line, a sort of haze. Charis has even been there, on a high-school day trip to Niagara Falls, but that part of it looked disappointingly similar; not like the part Billy comes from, which must be very strange. Strange, and more dangerous—that much is clear—and maybe because of that, superior. The things that happen there are said to matter in the world. Unlike the things that happen here.

So Charis runs her fingers over Billy, gloating a little, because here he is, in her bed, in her hands, her very own mythological creature, odd as unicorns, her very own captive draft dodger, part of a thousand headline stories, part of history, tucked away in secret in her house, the house for which she alone has had to sign the rental lease because nobody must know Billy’s name or where he is. Some of the draft dodgers have visas, but others—such as Billy—don’t, and once you’re inside this country you can’t get a visa, you’d have to go back across the border and apply from there, and then you’d be nabbed for sure.

Billy has explained all this; also that the Mounties are not really the Mounties of Charis’s childhood, not the picturesque men on horseback, in red uniforms, upright and true, who always get their man. Instead they are devious and cunning and in cahoots with the US. government, and if they put their finger on Billy he’s a dead duck, because—and she must never tell this to anyone, even his friends here don’t know about it—dodging the draft wasn’t the only thing he did. What else? He blew things up. A couple of people too, but they were an accident. That’s why the Mounties are after him.