Pasha Malla - The Withdrawal Method

Dave spoke before I could. "Think that's enough?"

People offered to help clean up, but I wasn't having any of it; they'd paid and I was offering a service. On their way out, everyone shook my hand and told me how great it had been, apologizing if they'd got out of control, offering to pay extra if I needed it. Colin paused at the door and said, "Jesus, Pauly, everyone in the whole town is going to want in on this. Totally amazing. Can I buy shares?"

I was left sweeping up, collecting shards of glass and ceramic and plastic and tin on the big wide broom and clearing everything down the aisles. While my hands trembled and the sweat cooled on my back, I still wasn't sure what to think about the whole business.

I'd been at it for maybe an hour when I heard a car pull up out front. I froze, broom in hand, wondering if one of my pals had forgotten something. Three doors slammed, I heard some muffled conversation from the parking lot, and someone knocked on the door. Through the window, I could see Kaede — with two or three other people clustered there too.

Standing on my step beside Kaede were the kid from the hospital and two other scruffy-looking adults. The man wore sweatpants, the elastics hiked well over his ankles, an old Ontario Hydro parka, and deck shoes. The woman had on an identical parka and a pair of tattered grey leggings. Between them was the kid. He teetered on a single crutch, leaning against his dad. Just like the photo: one black eye, one leg in a cast, and an arm in a sling. The other bandages were gone — or hidden under his clothes.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey," said Kaede. "Can we come in?"

Behind them a taxi idled in the parking lot. The night was cold and their breath came puffing at me out of the dark in clouds. I looked at the man's face, and the woman's, and the kid's, glowing golden in the light from the shop. The smell of cigarettes hung over them like a shroud. All three regarded me with the same expression: a sort of exhausted rage, like caged animals with very little fight left.

"Careful," I said, stepping over the splintered remains of a stack of ashtrays. "We had a bit of a party earlier."

"We know what went on here," said the man, lifting his son. "We want in."

"Bronco wants in," said the woman.

"Bronco?"

"That's me," said the kid.

I looked down at him. While his face seemed tired and gaunt, something in his eyes burned.

The dad strode across the shop and grabbed Dave's cricket bat, still leaning against the wall. "This'll do. Help him over here."

I realized he was talking to me, so I moved beside his son. Kaede nodded at me. Bronco wrapped his arm around my waist and leaned in.

"Careful," said his mom. "He's still real sore."

I moved slowly with the boy across the shop, around the occasional hit of stray trash, both of us with a gimpy leg, one step at a time. With the crutch working on one side and me on the other, Bronco limped along, wincing occasionally, toward his dad. When we got there he placed the bat into his son's hands and stepped away. "Okay," he said.

"What do you want to break, baby?" asked the mother, scanning the aisles. She saw what we all did: empty shelves, debris cluttering the floor, clothing racks smashed to pieces and their contents strewn about and covered in dust. At the back of the shop sat four huge piles of refuse.

"There's nothing left," Bronco said.

My eyes were on the cash register, sitting there untouched on the counter beside the dad — who, apparently, noticed it too. "There's this," he said, tapping it with his fingertips.

"Whoa," I said. "I need that. And it's an antique."

"Look what you did to my son," said the mother, her voice like ice. "Everything else is ruined. What does it matter?"

"No," I said. "It matters."

"Fuck you," said the dad. "Bron, do this one, buddy."

"No," I said. "I said no."

"After what you've done?" yelled the mother.

I was surprised when Kaede stepped forward. "After what he's done? Do you know what your son scratched onto his car?"

The parents looked at each other, then the son. Bronco tapped the bat in his hand.

"Just do it, Bron. Smash this thing." The dad pushed the register onto the floor. The bell dinged and the drawer clattered open wildly as it hit; one of the sides split and the Enter key popped loose, skittering off under a shelf.

The kid hobbled forward. Some response in me clicked and I grabbed the bat from his hand, lifting it above my head and out of reach. "Forget it," I said.

Things seemed to slow down. I breathed, turning to Kaede. The expression on her face was drawn, the lips tight — but in her eyes was something softer, something like an apology. Then they flashed. "Paul!" she cried.

I spun around and realized that the dad was on the move, wordlessly barrelling toward me from behind the counter. In his eyes was the same look that had been in his son's eyes when I'd smashed into him with my car: hunger, fury.

He was on me then, screaming into my face: I saw a mouth jawing away and felt a spray of spittle, the heat of breath, was aware of sounds but not words, not what was being said. Then a hand came flying out of somewhere, smacked me in the shoulder and knocked me reeling backward — right onto my bad ankle. Pain shot up my leg. I tensed, regained my balance, and then stood sure-footed, waiting.

The dad was coming at me again, fists up, and from somewhere I heard other voices — Kaede's, maybe the kid's and the mom's. Something, though, had caught hold of me. I stopped trying to make sense of what was going on. With the dad set to fight I stepped forward, oblivious to the flare of pain in my foot, and cocked the cricket bat, eyes trained on the flat smooth plane of the dad's cheekbone, hearing the crunch of splintering bones even before I started to swing.

ALTHOUGH HE FANCIED himself one, it would have been a stretch to consider Wolfgang von Kempelen much of a wolf, regardless of whether he was going by his Hungarian birth name, Farkas, or the Wolfgang it became when the empire's official language was changed to German. Kempelen was a haughty, blue-eyed fellow with sandy hair and whiskers resembling more those of a kitten than anything lupine. Yet even the feline comparison was limited to moments of inertia: born with a sort of defect in one of his feet, when forced into motion Kempelen staggered precariously from one place to the next, compromising anything that might have been taken for catlike charm.

At the age of twenty-one, Kempelen was introduced to Empress Maria Theresa at the suggestion of his father, a retired civil servant who had been a favourite of the former king. The monarch was immediately taken with this beguiling youth from Pressburg: having easily bested all the top chess players in the land, the empress had long been in search of a worthy opponent, and she found exactly that in young Wolfgang.

Their first match, Kempelen took Maria Theresa's offered hand, bowed slightly, and sat down behind the other side of the board, blue eyes sparkling, that half-smile almost playful, almost cocky.

"So you are the young genius everyone's talking about." The empress was thirty-seven at the time, with a frizzy poof of orange hair, bulging eyes that suggested a thyroid malfunction, and pale, sallow skin.

Kempelen shrugged. "Genius? Such a relative term."

The game commenced with Kempelen adopting a classic French opening and ended four hours later in a stalemate. A rematch a few days later produced the same result. Finally, after six games, Kempelen took Maria Theresa's queen during a gruelling endgame and, with her remaining pawn and knight gone astray across the board, winked and said, "I believe that's checkmate."