How Many Roads

Adam called her the Albino Jogger and she ran by the house at 6:23 a.m. each day, give or take a minute. If it was a workday and if all was well, Adam would be on the concrete landing outside the front door sipping coffee and having his first smoke. Sometimes in a parka and Sorels and stretchy gloves he’d cut the fingers out of himself. Sometimes in hospital pants he somehow convinced his father to lift from Toronto Western and whatever T-shirt he’d worn to bed. Once, during a heat-wave, he stood out there in boxers that, he discovered later, were the boxers he had intended to turn into a rag, he had turned into a rag, a change in purpose he’d signified by ripping a hole in the crotch, a hole he’d failed to recognize maybe because of the hangover or the swelter or maybe just because one of his roommates had put the rag back with his underwear when they found his laundry in the dryer and did him the favour by folding it all, which was nice, but which meant when he woke up feeling all swollen and strange and unable to open his eyes, when he struggled even to find the drawer handle and could barely wriggle his bare ass into the boxers, he certainly wasn’t going to recognize that the bunched up feeling he had between his legs was because his junk was hanging out of this rag that was, currently, functioning as crotch-less boxers. It was a good thing the Albino Jogger never turned her head towards him. That morning anyway.

Except in the very coldest weather, the Albino Jogger wore white running shoes that looked to Adam like Asics, white skintight jogging Capris, what Adam had decided after careful scrutiny must be short white bike shorts in place of underwear, a white tank-top, a white sports bra and a white head band. Against the winter, which turned her bursts of breath into vapour, she wore a furry white headband and a white coat that had horizontal puffy bars that reminded Adam of the Michelin man or a cloud.

And if the Albino Jogger wasn’t albino, she had a surprisingly small amount of pigment.

On the occasion of their one-year anniversary, Adam raised his coffee cup to her and she spit, though presumably without seeing him.

After Adam started dating Linda, he gradually spent more and more nights at her much nicer apartment. Eventually, he would just go to work from there. Linda was a fortune-teller who would sometimes wrap a colourful scarf with a fringe of circular mirrors around her head sit on the street beside a small folding table and a deck of Tarot Cards. She told people she was a Gypsy because, “They wouldn’t even know what I meant if I said Roma, and besides no one really wants a Czech lady reading their cards.” Linda encouraged Adam to quit smoking. He was down to one a day, which he still liked to have with his coffee. He was out on Linda’s balcony in a pair of plaid pajama pants that Linda had bought him when the Albino Jogger ran down the alleyway beyond the back fence. Adam spilled his coffee as he ran, with burning cigarette into Linda’s bedroom to check the red numbers on her bedside clock. 6:32.

He exhaled, impressed. If he walked to Linda’s place, he liked to leave himself twenty or twenty-five minutes. Adam walked over to his bedside table, stuck his lit cigarette in his mouth and reached down to pick up his watch. 6:35. Still, he thought. With a great rustling of sheets Linda rolled over. Adam suddenly saw the smoke rising from his cigarette and backed out of the room waving his arms in an attempt to get the smoke to come with him. At breakfast that morning, Linda asked if he could smoke further from the sliding doors because the smoke was really starting to permeate the apartment.

Adam started having his coffee and cigarette at 6:25. He would sit out there enjoying the air until he heard the Albino Jogger coming up the lane. He smiled when she passed the neighbour’s pine tree and he could see her. Some mornings she would have to jog in place to wait for this or that car, whose driver would usually stop the vehicle so the Albino Jogger could pass in the narrow space between the side mirror and Linda’s wooden fence.

Even after Adam finally quit smoking he would drink his coffee out back for the fresh air and the sight of her.

When Adam and Linda broke up, Adam had a rough patch. He applied for a police foundations program. After being accepted, he moved to a spacious apartment in a grand old building out by the college. Near the end of August he started running on a path along the lake. He wanted to get a head start on training for fear that his terrible physical condition would ostracize him from his likely much younger and fitter classmates. Adam pushed himself so hard on the second Saturday morning that he vomited into a hedge separating a rusting children’s playground in the backyard of a building from the blue-black asphalt of the running path and the breakwater’s freshly quarried rocks.

He sat down on the nearest bench and rinsed his mouth with water from his bottle. His eyes teared ferociously. He saw a white figure come towards him in a familiar rhythm. He tried to blink back the tears, tried to wipe them away, but she had rounded a bend before he could be sure it was the Albino Jogger. He wasn’t wearing a watch.

When Adam got back home, he made himself a coffee and used Google maps to trace his route, trying to figure out how far the hedge was from his apartment. No matter how accurately he placed the route’s line, he couldn’t get that hedge further than 6.2 km from his front door.

Then he created a route from his old apartment to the hedge, wondering if the Albino Jogger could possibly be running such a serious route each day. The hedge was at least 15 km from his old apartment. He decided that, if it was her, this must be a special weekend route.

Each Saturday after that, Adam ran past that hedge and each Saturday it got easier. He tried leaving his house at different times and once, on a cold November morning, he even tried sitting on the bench and waiting for her, but the Albino Jogger never came back, or maybe had never been there at all.

Adam was considered one of the fittest members of his cohort and he consistently finished in the top three in their long distance runs. He would even, once he finished, run back along the route to encourage the stragglers.

When he joined the gun club, it was because he wanted to get a head start on his classmates and on all the other candidates for the few jobs on nearby police forces. He started going every Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday afternoon. After his Sunday practice, he’d have a beer in the restaurant of the hotel across the street. Diane was one of the servers there and by June of Adam’s first year of the police foundations program, they were dating. She would join him on his Saturday jogs. They would get caffeine-free Americanos and a croissant from a new café near by, then drink their coffees and split the croissant on the bench near the hedge where Adam had vomited last summer.

It was there, with Diane, that Adam saw the Albino Jogger again. Only this time she was jogging with a handsome Asian guy, an East Asian guy, probably Chinese. She was covered in colour, too. The Asics logos on her shoes were cool pink fading into neon green, the shoe’s body covered in grey green splatter; her Capris were light blue with a yellow stripe starting wide at her hip and tapering to nothing just above her knee; the tight tank top pressing against her breasts was orange with reflective silver tiger stripes; her headband was a purple that might have been loud as part of a different outfit. The colours offset her unbelievably light hair and skin in a surprising way. Adam felt like he was seeing an old friend and he was thrilled when her blue eyes landed on him and held him for a second before leaping to Diane. Her mouth twitched with some change of feeling, then her companion said something and she laughed. Adam looked into his coffee, which was cooling with the lid off.

“What’s wrong,” Diane asked.

“Stop asking me that,” Adam said.

Adam looked up. The Albino Jogger and her companion had disappeared around a bend.

“So what do you think?” Diane asked.

“About what?”

“Were you even listening?”

Adam took a deep breath. He’d been feeling angrier lately. He looked at the lake and imagined pitching his decaf Americano into the water. Another deep breath took some of the edge off his anger. “I’m sorry. I was distracted.”

“Obviously. Do you know those people who ran by?”

“Nah. The woman’s just someone I used to see a lot.”

“Does she have . . . what’s that condition?”

“Albino?”

“Oh. Maybe. I was thinking about that thing Michael Jackson had.”

“Oh. Vitiligo.”

“Yeah yeah. You’re so good. How did you remember that?”

Adam laughed a bit.

“What?” Diane asked, leaning against his shoulder.

“I’ve got it on my balls.”

“Come on.”

“I’m surprised you never noticed.”

“Balls are gross. I try my best to ignore them.”

Diane asked Adam again about whether he would want to take a trip with her. Maybe fly down to Florida or Cuba or somewhere south during his reading week. “I’ll pay for it,” she said. Adam worked part-time still, but he was supported largely by his mother.

Adam wasn’t sure. “Um,” he started.

His search for what to say next was interrupted by a guy racing along the path in worn, loose sneakers, baggy jeans, ball cap and a T-shirt that still had some flecks of what was once an ornate network of gold ink covering most of the material. The guy jingled as he went by. One of the teenagers who worked at the coffee shop was chasing after him, too out of breath at this point to be shouting anything about, “Stop that man,” but his determination told Adam that he should stop that man. The guy was fast, but Adam was faster. They were on a stretch of the path where there were no grassy patches, so when Adam tackled the guy, they landed on interlocking bricks out front of a row of posh new condo townhouses whose façades were designed to make them look old.

“My fucking hands,” the guy said. One finger was dislocated. Adam turned away. The guy tried to kick Adam off him, but the exhaustion or the fall had rendered the guy’s legs extremely weak. “Okay. Fuck. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Oh my God, thank you. Thank you,” the teenager from the coffee shop said to Adam.

Nobody seemed to know what to say then. Adam, the guy and the teenager just breathed heavily while a crowd gathered. The guy was looking up at the sky and started moaning a little. His breath smelled like malt liquor, sleep and stale smoke. The teenager was hanging his head, exhausted. Diane was standing near by, holding the two cups of coffee and half-eaten croissant. Adam smiled at her, though he was disappointed not to see the Albino Jogger and her companion in the assembled crowd—just some tiny, fluffy dogs with old people in Tilley hats and children with their parents.

The guy coughed.

“Okay,” Adam said. “So what happened?”

“He’s got our money,” the teenager said. “Give me our money.”

It was from the tip jar, so it was just over twenty dollars of change. Adam had needed to dig in the guy’s pockets to fish it out because the guy’s hands were in really bad shape.

Adam took the guy in a cab to Emergency. The guy’s name was Max and he was 19, though he looked like he could be in his late 20s. His health card was in his wallet, but he’d left his wallet at home. “I always leave that shit at home. Nothing in it I can use. Not even a library card or some shit.” Adam smiled apologetically at the woman in a hijab holding her sick child within earshot.

“Is there anybody at home I can call?”

“Kwame’s there today.”

Kwame was a worker at Max’s group home. Adam left Max at the Hospital and went home to get his car. He explained the situation to Diane, who was getting dressed to go for her shift. Then Adam drove over to the group home. It was right near the gun club.

By the time Max had been seen and Adam had dropped him off, Adam had decided to volunteer with the kids at the home. That week her arranged with Linda, Kwame’s boss, to come and do a fitness program Wednesday night instead of going shooting and Sunday afternoons after he’d gone shooting.

Instead of going on a trip with Diane over his reading week, Adam did a series of full day activities with some of the kids from the group home, including a canoe trip. From the back of a canoe with Max, Adam watched the first snow fall on the city.

Adam and Diane had broken up by Easter.

Years passed. Adam started working for the City’s police force. Because of his work with youth, he became involved in a mural-painting program that supported illegal graffiti artists to find legal contracts and do legal work. When he turned 30, Adam bought a small bungalow for himself in a neighbouring municipality.

Adam’s dream had always been to work in homicide and when he was 33 he got his chance. It was fascinating and he trained his brain to hold on to and turn over details, which was a professional asset, but a personal liability. One victim, killed in a domestic dispute, was albino, but an albino of African descent. Still, in his dreams, as his mind sorted through the troubling details of that particular investigation, it inserted the Albino Jogger, dressed in all white as she had been back when he’d lived a less structured, less useful life. He lay in bed for a while, then sat up and grabbed a book. Eventually he fell back to sleep with the book on his chest and his bedside light burning.

When Max called Adam with the good news, Adam was jogging along a different stretch of lake, red and yellow leaves skittering across his path. He was out of breath, but happy to hear from Max. “Married! To who?” Allison had been another kid at the group home back when Max was there. Like too many girls her age, she’d hated her skin and buried her face in cover-up of a colour that under the group home’s lights matched her natural skin colour, but that took on too orange a hue when she went outside. Max had kept in touch with her and they’d both straightened out their lives and they’d fallen in love. “Great news. That’s great news.”

“I was, well, we are hoping you can come.”

“When is it?”

“In February. In Mexico.”

“Oh. Wow. That’s excellent.” He closed his eyes. He’d never been to Mexico. “Yeah. Yeah. Send me the invitation.”

He gave Max his email address.

When February came, Adam had just been involved in an investigation into the disappearance and likely murder of a nine-year-old girl from his old neighbourhood. He hadn’t had a full night of sleep in 29 days. He spoke to his supervisor about the possibility of staying home to keep working on the investigation. His supervisor told him he needed the break.

The airport was chaos, but Adam was in no way responsible for managing the chaos, so it had a calming effect on him. He went to the newsstand and was looking at sports magazines and exercise magazines when an image of an Albino child caught his eye. He bought the magazine even though it was about photography. He also bought a book for young adults because he liked the graphic on the cover.

He ran into Kwame at the gate. Kwame was married to his longtime boyfriend, Alex, and the two lived in a co-op in Cabbagetown. Kwame was working with the school board now, as a social worker. He had never been to Mexico, either. They checked their tickets and realized that they were sitting in different parts of the plane. Still, they would be seeing a lot of each other. They laughed. They talked about what a great kid Max had been.

On the plane, Adam tried to read his book, but realized that it was the third in a series and, though he’d been enjoying the book, he found this fact discouraging. He pulled out the photo magazine and looked through it as he sipped a complimentary coffee. He was so tired. He leaned back to sleep.

He dreamed of the Albino Jogger. She wasn’t dead. She was jogging past him on a street of red brick houses he didn’t recognize and wearing a sky blue outfit. She was running in her familiar rhythm, going as quickly as always, but somehow she was stuck in front of Adam. When he realized this, his sleeping mind made the sidewalk a treadmill and even put a person on it who whipped by in the opposite direction.

He woke when the pressure in his head told them they were on their descent.

He woke rested.

He smiled at the woman next to him, but he was smiling for himself.

Toronto, Feb.-March, 2016

Emoji Sequence: Chloë Lum of Chloë Lum & Yannick Desranleau (f.k.a Seripop), formerly of AIDS Wolf  

Story: Lee Sheppard

Wash Me Off

The clinic was downtown, right near Dad’s office, right near the restaurant Julia and Cindy had opened up, right near the investment branch of CIBC Wood Gundy where Laura Jarvis was holding tens of thousands of Grandpa’s dollars for me in trust. Sure, other towns have these kinda clinics and yes, I wish I’d thought of that. It was fine, though. No one saw me walk in there all burning with the meaning of it.

My risk of infection was actually nil. I’d made out with people. My first kisses, with Julie C., were closed-mouth under a pine tree by the wood-post-and-wire back fence of my primary school. I might have had chapped lips once or twice. I’d never have kissed little Julie, her straight blonde hair always carefully in place with a hair band that matched her outfit, when I had a cold sore. Open-mouthed, my first kiss was in the little nook by the staffroom of my middle school with Melissa S. There was lots of saliva, so much saliva that it ended up dribbling down our chins. When I first kissed Stephanie P., she had braces that scraped the skin above my upper-lip and below my lower-lip, but there was no blood. The only needles I’d ever had were administered by my dad or in a hospital or dentist’s office. The only sex I’d ever had was digital. Did I have vicious hangnails when I ineffectively fingered Joanne H.? It’s funny what you think about when you ask for an AIDS test.

I had most of the other STD tests done, too. I skipped the gonorrhea test because all I knew about gonorrhea was that the nurse said I had, “like, zero risk of it,” and that they would need to swab my urethra to check for it. No thanks.

I was clean, of course. Not that having an STD is unclean. Negative, I mean. And I was relieved.

I went to Navy Park, down by Lake Ontario. I watched the gentle waves wash up on the rocks. With each swell, water rushed up gurgling between two nearby rocks and it reminded me of my blood rushing into the phials the nurse popped off of and onto the opposite end of the syringe. When they said, “Negative,” that meant, “Positive”, right? The counselor who told me the results seemed really calm, but she didn’t seem excited, she wasn’t excited for me. She just asked, “Do you have any questions?”

I walked from the water to the nearest payphone and dropped in my quarter.

“Trafalgar medical clinic, how can I help you?”

“Hello, it’s Dr. Warriner’s son, Mark. Can I speak to my father?”

“Yeah, hi Mark. No problem.”

“Hi. Thanks,” I said, but the receptionist was gone. I used to know the receptionists, but I had forgotten their names.

Dad cleared his throat. “Yeah, Mark, hi.”

“Hey Dad, how’s it going?”

“What do you need, Mark?”

“With blood tests and, you know, other tests, when they say negative that means they didn’t find what they were looking for, right?”

“That’s right.”

“That’s what I thought,” I said. “That’s what I told them.”

“Told who?”

“This friend who was asking.”

“Was it Hannah?”

“What? Oh, no. Not Hannah. Another friend. Charlie.”

“How’s school going?”

“Fine.”

“Okay. Have a good day, Mark.”

“You too, Dad.”

I started the long walk back to the school. Just south of the path under the QEW, on the upper eastern edge of the ravine cut by the Sixteen Mile Creek, I passed by a Volkswagen Beetle painted red with big black dots like a ladybug. On one of our first afternoons together, a ladybug had landed on my jeans and Hannah had pressed her hand against my leg and held it there until the insect crawled onto her finger. “Some people consider these signs of good luck. The dots are supposed to remind you of the many blessings in your life.”

I smiled at the VW Beetle leaning into the ditch. The doors opened. The driver got out easily. The passenger, holding a wreath, had to navigate the ditch. They walked solemnly into the graveyard I always forget about, the cemetery orphaned there by recent commercial expansion into this area.

I was that student who could miss classes and go to their teachers and say, “I’m sorry I missed class, I had an appointment,” and offer to bring a note only to have the offer refused. Which is what happened.

In my last period—Finite Math—my buddy Trevor was like, “Why’d you even come back to school?”

“What else was I going to do?”

“Isn’t tonight the big night with Hannah?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “I don’t want to put too much expectation on it.”

“Here,” he fished in his bag and pulled out a condom, tucked it into his palm and reached across the aisle of desks. I took it, even though I’d secreted away a stockpile over the years.

“Thanks.” I put it in my pocket quickly.

“Not in there,” Trevor said.

“What?”

“Not in your pocket. The heat can make it weaker. You don’t want it to break.”

“Uh?” I looked around.

“In your backpack.”

The teacher, Mr. Maris, looked up from his marking and said, “That’s enough boys.”

I nodded and set down to work, but Trevor wasn’t finished. “You know what I’d be doing right now?” Nicole W. looked back at us, annoyed. Trevor pretended to jerk off under the desk.

“What?”

“So you don’t come too fast.”

“Boys,” Mr. Maris said. “I don’t want to ask you again.”

I worked for a while. I knew Trevor wanted to say more to me. He kept shifting in his seat and sticking his pencil in his mouth and tapping on the desk. Eventually, the noise of conversations in the class would increase, that was just the rhythm of it, and I waited for there to be four other conversations going at significant volume before I turned to Trevor.

“Okay,” he said. “Uncle Trevor’s got one more tip.”

“Uh, ‘Uncle Trevor.’”

He giggled. “Think about other stuff, right. Stuff that is upsetting or gross or just totally unsexy.”

“Like baseball,” I said.

“You like baseball,” he said.

It was true.

“So,” Trevor said, “I had this crazy dream. I was, I don’t know, looking at Melissa’s bare back and she had these, like, weird holes in her back, holes that I couldn’t see the bottom of.”

“What the fuck? Like cuts?”

“They weren’t wounds. They were maybe more like nostrils. But they had skin flaps over them, that opened and closed.”

“Weird. Like eyelids?”

“Yeah, but with no eyelashes.”

Nicole was looking at us again. I put my head down lower to the desk and started whispering. “That’s upsetting.”

“Sometimes that keeps me up at night.”

“No kidding.”

“So, think of something like that.”

I made a face. “Imagine.”

Trevor giggled again.

My scalp started itching and I shivered. “Thanks, I guess.”

“You can ask Uncle Trevor anything.”

“I’m such a lucky nephew.”

When I got home, I lined the condoms I had up along the counter in my basement bathroom. I looked at each package and was surprised to find expiry dates. The “Xtra THICK” condom Trevor had given me and this thin slimy orange one swimming around behind the clear plastic back of its wrapping were the only ones that weren’t past due. As I was throwing the other ones out, I flashed back to the public health clinic and the nurse with the wooden phallus and its abstract simplicity. As the nurse showed me how to coax the condom on over the tip and down the shaft, I was glad Hannah hadn’t come with me like she’d offered to.

I hung onto one of the condoms, got myself ready and slipped it on. I tried getting myself off like that, with the condom on, but first I started thinking about Trevor’s dream and all those fleshy valves, then my mom and sister came home and I could hear them upstairs arguing about practicing the piano. Though there was nothing to keep in there, I pinched the tip like the nurse had showed me to do, pulled the condom off and tied it up like some limp balloon. I washed my hands.

Dinner was pasta and garlic bread and this salad with sweet onion and garlic vinaigrette. “Hannah’s coming over tonight,” I reminded mom.

“Mm,” she said through a mouthful of romaine and Vidalia. “I forgot.” A chunk of food flew out of her mouth and landed somewhere on her lap. “Hu,” she laughed as she covered her mouth with a napkin.

“Will she still be here after dance class?” my sister asked. My sister loved hogging Hannah’s attention.

“Probably,” I said.

They left at 5:30. I did most of the dishes, then I went and brushed my teeth. It had been my intention to leave the remaining mess as a protest for all the garlic in the dinner, but I needed to fill a bit more time before Hannah arrived, so I did all the pots and pans and even wiped the counter.

Hannah arrived at seven after six, which gave us just over an hour before my mom and sister got back. Hannah had on this lovely red dress that was form fitting at the top and through the hips, but flared out around the knees. She spun and I saw that the fabric dipped low on her back and you could see acres of her skin. “Hot,” I said and immediately started to feel bad about my outfit—a YMCA day camp T-shirt I’d had for years, my favourite blue hoodie and a pair of jeans I hadn’t washed in at least a month.

She wrapped her arms around me and pressed her body against mine and before she kissed me she asked, “Excited?”

“Yes,” I said, but it didn’t sound like me talking.

She held my hand and led me downstairs to my bedroom. I could see Hannah’s skin lying in a gently contoured, thick sheet over her shifting spine and shoulder blades. I shuddered remembering Trevor’s dream. “Are you okay?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” I told her.

Even as she undressed beside my bed and whispered for me to get undressed, I had to push away thoughts of some malformed body from someone else’s nightmare.

Eventually, Hannah asked if I was feeling sick and I said I was and we lay there cuddling and even though we were both covered by my flannel bed sheets, our skin touching was making me feel terrible. I moved away from her and pressed my fingers against my closed eyes, but I could feel the lenses shifting under my eyelids and I had to get my hand away. Hannah rubbed my arm.

“I’m sorry,” I said, sitting up.

“It’s okay,” she assured me, but I could hear that it wasn’t.

I got dressed. I put on a record. Hannah got dressed. We sat there listening for a while before Hannah called her dad to pick her up.

“Oh Hannah,” Mom said when she saw her, “you look lovely. What’s the occasion?”

“Nothing,” Hannah said.

“Well, I love the dress.”

Hannah and my sister played Go Fish on the glass table in the front room. I lay beside them on the couch that was used so infrequently that the cushions were still convex.

I kissed Hannah’s cheek as we said goodbye. She told me to feel better.

“Was everything okay?” Mom asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said and went downstairs.

I stared at myself for a while in the bathroom mirror, then I fished the expired condom I’d used earlier out of the garbage can and flushed it down the toilet.

Hannah and I didn’t talk on the phone that night. Mom came down while I was reading and sat on the edge of the bed. She said she loved me, then sat and waited for me to say something. Anything. I asked if she could turn the overhead light off on her way out.

When she was gone, I put my book down and turned off my bedside light and lay in the dark.

I don’t know when sleep washed me off.

Toronto, November 2015

Emoji Sequence: The talented and productive, Anita Doron, director and co-writer of The Lesser Blessed, among other films both feature-length and short

Story: Lee Sheppard