It’s funny, she thought, you say a word like prostitution and it sounds truly horrifying. Like “AIDS” or “cancer.” But she had never thought of it that way when she was doing it. She met a couple of other girls who had been on the street a long time and they talked about hooking or turning tricks, but those words didn’t apply, either. Not that she was too good for it: it was just that her mind veered away from the topic. She was surviving. Being paid for sex … it just wasn’t something you thought much about, before or during or after. And when you stop doing it, you don’t have to think about it. And so it goes away. It doesn’t show. No visible scars … although sometimes, in her paranoid moments, Amelie wasn’t so sure about that. Sometimes she developed the urge to hide her face when she rode the buses or waited on tables.

But by and large it was something she could forget about, and that was why Roch had pissed her off so intensely. Reminding her of that. Worse, acting like it was something she might do again. As if, once you do it, you’re never any better than that: it’s what you are. Trained reflex. Go fetch. Lie down and roll over.

But really, that was just Roch. Roch always had a hard time figuring out what anybody else was doing or thinking. One time, when he was nine or ten, Roch asked a friend of Amelie’s named Jeanette how come she was so ugly. Jeanette turned brick red and slapped his face. Roch wasn’t hurt, his feelings weren’t hurt, but he was almost comically surprised. Later he asked Amelie: what happened? Did he break a rule or something?

All Roch wanted was a little cash, a loan. He hadn’t meant anything by it.

She was too sensitive, that was all.

What was really frightening was the question of how Roch might respond to the beating John had given him. Because, the thing was, Roch could not forget a humiliation. He harbored grudges and generally tried to pay them back with interest.

But, Amelie told herself, there was no point in dwelling on it now.

She dried the dishes, put the towel up to dry, joined Benjamin in the main room. The TV was a black-and-white model Amelie had bought from a thrift shop, attached to a bow-tie antenna from a garage sale. The rooming house didn’t have cable, so they watched sitcoms on the CBC all evening. Benjamin didn’t say a word—just folded his hands in his lap and seemed to watch, though his eyes were foggy and distracted. Sometime around midnight, they went to bed.

She was almost asleep, lying on her back in the dark room listening to the sound of the rain against the window, when he said:

“What if I went away for a while?”

She felt suddenly cold.

She sat up. “Where would you go?”

He shrugged. “I don’t want to talk about that part of it.”

Everything seemed in sudden high relief: the faint streetlight against the cloth curtains, the coolness of the bedsheets where they touched her thighs. “Is it connected with this woman?”

Saying it out loud at last.

He said, “She’s a doctor.”

“Are you sick?”

“Maybe.”

“Is it about—” Another taboo. “About John?”

He nodded in the darkness, a shadow.

Amelie said, “Well, I don’t want you to leave.”

“But if I have to?”

“I don’t know what that means—’have to.’ If you have to, then you just do it.”

“I mean, would you be here for me.”

His voice was solemn, careful.

“I don’t know,” she said. Thinking: Christ, yes, of course I’ll be here!

He was the best thing in her life and if there was even a chance of him coming back … but she couldn’t say that. “Maybe,” she said.

He nodded again.

He said, “Well, maybe it won’t happen.”

“Talk to me,” she said. “Before you do anything.”

“I’ll try,” Benjamin said.

And then silence. And the rain beating down.

They woke a little after dawn and made love.

There was one frightening moment, when Amelie looked into his eyes, and for a second—not longer than that—she had the terrifying feeling that it was John looking down at her, his cold and penetrating vision a kind of rape … but then she blinked, and the world slid back into place; he was Benjamin again, moving against her with a passion that was also kindness and which she had allowed herself to think of as love.

The vision of him crowded out her fear.

He was Benjamin. And that was good.

7

For the rest of that rainy October week Susan immersed herself in the mystery of John Shaw.

I’ve talked to him, she thought. In a sense, I know him…

But beyond that loomed the inescapable fact:He is not entirely human.

There was no way to reconcile these ideas.

She tried to stay in her hotel room in case he called, but by Thursday morning she was overcome with cabin fever. She left a firm order at the desk to take any phone messages and set out on foot with no real direction in mind.

The rain had stopped, at least. The sky was overcast and the wind was cold, but even that was gratifying after the monotony of recycled hotel air. She walked west, away from the downtown core. Toronto was a banking city, crowded with stark office towers; its charm, she had decided, was peripheral to this, in Chinatown or the University district. She turned north along University Avenue, willfully avoiding the direction of Benjamin’s office. Shortly before noon she found herself between a phalanx of peanut carts and the granite steps of the Royal Ontario Museum, with pennies in her pocket and nowhere else to go.

Inside, the museum was all high domed ceilings and Egyptians, botanical displays and gemstones under glass. Susan appreciated these, but she especially liked the dark vaults of the dinosaur arcade, cool Pleistocene fluorescence and faint voices like the drip of water. The articulated bones of Triceratops regarded her with the stately indifference of geological time. Susan returned the look for almost a quarter of an hour, reverently.

Beyond Triceratops, the corridor wound away to the left. She eased back slowly into human history; where she was startled, turning a corner, by the Evolution of Man.

It was one of those museum displays that compare the skull sizes, tools, curvature of the spine across the eons. Here was Homo habilis leading the human march out of Olduvai, but surely, Susan thought, the entire concept was archaic: did anyone still believe evolution had proceeded in this reasonable arc? From stone club to Sidewinder missile, here at the pinnacle of time?

But she supposed John would have had a place here, too, if anyone had known about him. Dr. Kyriakides had once told her that he wanted to engineer the next step in human evolution. “A better human being. One who would make us obsolete. Or at least embarrass us for our vices.”

So here would be John, leading the march toward the future, a little taller and a little brighter and in his hand—what? A pocket H-bomb? A neutrino evaporator? Or he might be as pristine as Dr. Kyriakides had envisioned him … as weaponless and innocent as a child.

She turned away. Suddenly she wanted the high ceilings of the main arcades, not this cloistered space. But before she left she paused before the diorama of Neolithic Man, stooped and feral in wax, wincing at the first light of human awareness. Our father, she thought. Mine and John’s, too; as obdurate, inscrutable, and foreign as every father is.

Still he did not call.

Friday afternoon she phoned Maxim Kyriakides at his office at the University.