Two – Silver Paper

Chapter 3

I‘ m lying on the floor, on a futon, covered by a duvet. Futon, duvet: this is how far we’ve come. I wonder if Stephen ever figured out what futons and duvets were. Most likely not. Most likely if you’d said futon to him, he’d have looked at you as if he was deaf or you were brain-damaged. He did not exist in the futon dimension.

When there were no futons and no duvets, the price of an ice cream cone was five cents. Now it’s a dollar if you’re lucky, and not as big either. That’s the bottom-line difference between then and now: ninety-five cents.

This is the middle of my life. I think of it as a place, like the middle of a river, the middle of a bridge, halfway across, halfway over. I’m supposed to have accumulated things by now: possessions, responsibilities, achievements, experience and wisdom. I’m supposed to be a person of substance. But since coming back here I don’t feel weightier. I feel lighter, as if I’m shedding matter, losing molecules, calcium from my bones, cells from my blood; as if I’m shrinking, as if I’m filling with cold air, or gently falling snow.

With all this lightness I do not rise, I descend. Or rather I am dragged downward, into the layers of this place as into liquefied mud.

The fact is that I hate this city. I’ve hated it so long I can hardly remember feeling any other way about it. Once it was fashionable to say how dull it was. First prize a week in Toronto, second prize two weeks in Toronto, Toronto the Good, Toronto the Blue, where you couldn’t get wine on Sundays. Everyone who lived here said those things: provincial, self-satisfied, boring. If you said that, it showed you recognized these qualities but did not partake of them yourself.