Andrew Pyper - The Wildfire Season

‘What do they do?’

‘You mean you’ve never—?’

‘No. I’ve never most things.’

‘That’s okay. They basically take whatever mood you’re in and enhance it, make you see beyond what you’d normally see.’

‘You’re looking at me. What do you see?’

‘A lot of things.’

‘Name one.’

‘I see someone who’s wondering if she can trust this guy she’s never met before, but thinks that she’d like to.’

‘Well,’ Alex laughs, pulling away before she could spoil everything by lunging forward to bite his lips. ‘I guess I’d better have some of those. You can’t be the only mind reader around here.’

Inside, the party gets suddenly louder, as though from a single twist of a volume knob. Alex can hear Jen squealing, pretending to be ticklish. A shattered glass receives a round of applause. The bass line from ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ trembles through the kitchen window, entering the steel bones of the fire escape along with Miles and Alex themselves.

But nobody comes outside to interrupt them. Huddled close, their voices low and secretive, as though the simple facts they share are instead shocking revelations they had every intention of taking with them to the grave. They talk about the towns they were from, their majors, the four years that separated their ages (Miles was older), all without telling each other their names. Yet when they finally get around to introducing themselves, with a mannered, lingering handshake, they feel they already knew that they were Miles and Alex, and that speaking these words aloud merely satisfied a formality demanded of them.

‘Have you climbed the mountain yet?’ he asks her, and at first she thinks he is speaking figuratively, of some spiritual challenge he has already overcome that she hasn’t even heard of. But in the next second she realizes he only means Mont Royal, the slope that rears up over campus and all of downtown, a patch of Canadian Shield in the middle of the city with an illuminated cross on top.

‘I’ve worried that I’d get lost.’

‘I brought my compass,’ Miles says, tapping the side of his head.

Alex pulls off Jen’s heels and clanks down the fire escape stairs after him, barefoot. Up St Dominique, turning to catch their reflections in the windows of the Vietnamese and churrasceira restaurants on Duluth, north again past the musky, shivering nightclub lineups on St Laurent. Alex wonders if it’s the mushrooms that make her feel like she is levitating a half inch off the sidewalks.

They enter the park at L’Esplanade, emerging from the enclosure of streets into the expansive night. Alex can see the graphite outline of the mountain now, the white bulbs of the cross. When they move into the forest at the mountain’s base they don’t bother searching for a trail. ‘This way’s up and that’s where we’re going,’ Miles tells her, dodging his way around maple saplings and warning her not to stub her toes on the larger rocks poking through the soil like half-buried skulls. Even though she can still hear the mechanical murmur of the city behind her, Alex imagines she is being pursued. Some wild thing—an animal or fire—hunts her on the slope.

At the crest, she scratches through a patch of burrs to find Miles lying on his back, panting. Alex looks behind her, expecting to see the grid of lights and the Olympic Stadium oval as she has in postcards, but the trees block her view of all but strange flickers between the trunks, dancing like embers.

‘It’s bigger than you’d guess, isn’t it?’ Miles asks her, and she follows where he’s pointing at the cross directly above them.

‘And brighter.’

‘Bigger, brighter, better. That’s the shrooms.’

No, that’s you , Alex nearly says.

Now that they are lying close they discover a comfortable silence between them. Miles finds Alex’s hand and links his fingers through hers, a grade-school gesture of affection that disarms her nevertheless. They stay there, splayed out in the one piece of wilderness on an island of three million, until the first cold of autumn brings them to their feet.

‘You guided me up here,’ she says. ‘Now you follow me.’

Alex’s apartment is a small 3 1/ 2over a bagel bakery. From the front window, the two of them look down on the street, where a line of assorted last-call drunks wait to get something to eat before the long stumble home. Even the curtains smell of coalfire and boiled dough from downstairs.

‘It makes me constantly hungry,’ she says, pouring both of them glasses of ice water. ‘But I love it. So do the mice.’

‘Have you set traps?’

‘Jen wants to, but I’ve been stalling. I know it’s ridiculous, but my thinking is, they’ve got to live somewhere , right?’

‘That’s not ridiculous.’

‘Do you have mice?’

‘No. But I don’t have walls, either.’

‘Where do you live?’

‘In my van.’

‘Don’t you have friends you could stay with?’

‘Some. But I’ve found a very picturesque parking lot. It’s like they say: location, location, location.’

In the morning, Alex awakens with Miles’s arm wrapped around her, pulling her into his body. She remembers the delicate but insistent way that he took her clothes off under the covers, only to lie close, their whispers getting tangled in her hair. Sometime in the night they must have drifted into sleep, but she feels that even in their dreams they continued their talk, adding new confessions to the ones already offered, trumping each other’s Most Embarrassing Moment and Worst First Date stories until her laughter shook her awake.

She turns over as quietly as she can, hoping to study Miles’s face, but his eyes are already open. Alex lands her fingers on his shoulder and presses down, feels the muscle there yield to her. Her hand strokes lower and touches something stuck to him. A round button of fluff.

‘What is that?’ she says.

‘What?’

‘That.’

Miles tries to look over his shoulder but only Alex can see what’s there. A furry grey circle the size of a dollar coin pressed into the skin. Alex pulls on the string attached to it and peels it off Miles’s back.

‘A mouse,’ she says, dangling it between them.

‘A flat mouse.’

‘The poor thing. Snuggled up under the sheets one minute, and the next, the giant decides to roll over and phwat !’

‘So much happens when you’re asleep,’ Miles says, genuinely amazed.

Alex places the mouse on the bedside table. It’s only then that she kisses his mouth.

When she bites, he doesn’t pull away.

Jen moved out the next week. It wasn’t supposed to be Alex, the naive Canadian, but Jen who found the cute older guy to skip class with for three days straight and spend all of them in the bedroom, living on sex, magnums of red wine and Thai takeout. The injustice was so intolerable she unhooked the shoe racks hanging on her walls and took a room in the all-girls dorm where she didn’t have to deal with ‘shared bubble baths and bare asses running down the hallway all the time.’

Alex and Miles didn’t mind the mice, and though the apartment was small, it was, as Miles liked to point out, a good deal bigger than the back of a van. At first, they told each other it was an arrangement of convenience. For the first months, happy as they were, both of them found it easier to speak of their lease on the place over the bagel shop as the thing that brought them together, instead of something more truthful but overwhelming, like love or fate.

Still, they couldn’t help themselves from making plans. Alex was taking education and, after some obligatory internships at special schools, discovered she had a talent for working with children with learning disabilities. Miles had to admit that Intro to Anatomy was the first course he’d ever taken where he saw the point behind it all, the practical link between science and people. He pored over textbooks with their painted pages of interconnected organs, arteries and bones, and could recognize not only the beauty in it but the ways he might fix them if the system failed or came under attack. Alex envisioned him as a surgeon. She told Miles he had all the natural skills for the job, which, in her mind, consisted mainly of a kind face and strong hands. Although Miles had never seriously thought of being a doctor before, within weeks she had persuaded him to apply to medical school the year after next. The University of Toronto was near the top of the field for both of them. The bagels weren’t as good, but they figured they could handle just about any deprivation so long as they were together.