Archive of Our Own

1.

“Aren’t you—”

Jay peeled off another fifty.

The pilot’s eyebrow cocked. Her eyes tracked Matt as he sat down on the tarmac between them. Jay peeled off still another fifty and pressed it into her hand. This had always been a weakness in the post-apocalypse plan—this necessary third party to get them the last fifty roadless and overgrown bushmiles to the camp. The knots in his stomach were tightening.

“Is he okay,” said the pilot.

“He got hit by lightning,” said Jay.

“Alright,” said Matt. “I am. Alright I am!”

You couldn’t tell how bad it was with the camo sweatsuit on. There was just some light singeing to his hair.

“And you’re going to… a fishing camp?”

Jay showed her the coordinates on a laminated card he kept in his wallet. He’d bought the place years ago with Bitcoin and it didn’t even technically exist. It probably would not hold them forever, there were too many variables, but it would buy them at least a couple weeks. Surely by now Reid had already been happy to spill all the dirty secrets he’d spent years covering up to the press and the fans. They were salacious enough that the cops and the media were likely to spend at least a week combing Toronto’s gay community and underground party scene. Some of the less above-board bathhouses might get slapped with health department notices. And certainly the DL guys would be furious. But it served them all right for not buying Jay’s dance remix album. And it would give them time for Matt to recover before they would have to move on again, somewhere, somehow.

“It’s on Monroe Lake,” Jay said to the pilot, careful to keep his voice even. “Do you know it?”

“Sure.” The pilot counted the money in her hand. “Happy to get you there,” she said. “Come on up.”

Jay and the pilot had to work together to help Matt up into the belly of the little floatplane. They had decided he was fine but his wiring was screwed up. He said his heart was back to normal but then he had had some coffee at a truck stop in Thompson and messed it up again. He said his hands felt like there was another intelligence alive in there. There was a strange rash, red and raised in a weird intricate pattern, across his arms and chest which were annoyingly buff now. He said he didn’t remember what had happened, which seemed entirely reasonable, except Jay didn’t remember either.

Once they had loaded him in they went to the truck for the supplies, and then Jay gave the pilot the keys. “Just treat it like it’s stolen,” he told her, hoping she would understand what that meant, and she nodded. He had specifically taken the truck for this reason, and not something that would stand out up here, like the Porsche—no matter how much he had dreamed of driving it on these windy roads.

The pilot gave the propellor a spin. Jay had in fact been in one of these little planes before, for some viral social media content sponsored by the Alberta provincial government they were now no doubt expending significant resources to scrub from the internet. He got up in the backseat beside Matt and put the headphones on—flash of the studio, can we do it again, less, uh, uncertain and agonized?— and put Matt’s headphones on and made sure their seatbelts were buckled and then the pilot was starting the engine and they were taxiing out to the runway and this was really maybe almost over. Like the whole thing, decades, was really, unbelievably, about to be done. You just couldn’t get your hopes up until you were fully off the ground. Jay turned and looked back toward the tiny low buildings at the end of the dirt road that had taken them to this place. Pines, gray hills, smoky sky. Turned back around, Matt was looking at his hands, trying to read the map in the red lines.

“Ready?” said the pilot into the headset over the roar of the engine.

Jay had in fact been ready for a long time. In 2020, he had made a series of escape maneuvers. He after all had nothing better to do. Normally when he felt this keyed up and trapped he would disappear to a bathhouse or a warehouse party for twenty-four to forty-eight hours and limp back home to sit in weak post-coital ecstasy in an Epsom salt bath and face the wrath of Reid. He was pretty sure the sex parties were still happening despite the pandemic if you knew where to look, but Jay did not particularly want to get covid. There was all this scary shit in the news. Out of boredom he allowed himself to be talked into recording a charity song that everyone hated. Everyone seemed to hate everything, which got him thinking. Maybe it was a premonition, which he had sometimes, though they were never songs anymore. Maybe it was that he watched Les Miserables. He started thinking about the revolution. Once upon a time he and Matt had sold their blood plasma to afford rent, but the Twitter socialists didn’t know that. Therefore, he was certainly going to be eaten.

He channeled all the knowledge of sneaking he had ever learned from Matt or from ten years’ intrepid absconding away from his handlers to refill his PrEP prescription and have anonymous gay sex. He incorporated an anonymous LLC in the U.S. state of Wyoming and used it to buy the fishing camp on Monroe Lake with Bitcoin. He bought a truck registered to the same anonymous LLC, rented a parking space for it in a garage downtown with cash, and outfitted it with blackout windows and traffic camera-obscuring reflective tape. He covertly groomed the hedges behind the bathroom window of his mansion so that they might be shimmied underneath. He withdrew non-notable amounts of cash on a staggered basis over many months and kept stockpiles in various locations. In May of 2021 he did a trial run, snuck out of the Bridle Path house, and went up to the camp in Manitoba to make sure it was all appropriately outfitted in case of apocalypse. There were some food supplies, a water filter under the sink that processed water drawn straight from the lake, fishing equipment, several rifles, a piano, a tape recorder, a moderately comfortable bed. He actually liked it there, more than he thought he would, liked the silence and the strange birds. When he got back Reid was furious. “This is a new low even for you. A week? We were activating the contingency plan in case you really had gotten yourself killed and dumped in Lake Ontario this time.” He marched Jay to the doctor’s office for an STD screen—clean as always! he wasn’t a total fool—then to the studio. Jay didn’t say anything. He did as he was told as usual.

The world opened back up. Jay made a new album and toured. He cashed the CanCon check. He went out and got laid every once in a while. He allowed himself to be photographed at lunch with Carly Rae Jepsen. He was tempted sometimes to use the stores of cash or sell the Manitoba house to buy something in the Caribbean like a normal person. But something told him it would be important someday.

Then on a nondescript July Thursday he came to from a strange dream behind the wheel of a vintage Winnebago careening down Queen Street, watching smoke rise out of the head of a person he hadn’t seen in almost twenty years. And music filled the world.

---

---

---

Detective Johnson was watching the video again. How was it possible that in this era of mass surveillance this was the best the police could get? The evidently psychotic guy in the hat trying to commandeer the thunderstorm like Gandalf or something had blown the power to the block, so the only video footage available to the Toronto Police SCI homicide squad was from a battery operated camera in a fetish shop across the street. Leave it to the fetishists! But even the best efforts of the forensic video team could not do much for graphic fidelity here. The RV barreled into view at two frames per second. Sparks exploded. Whoever was behind the wheel of the Winnebago yanked it a full one-eighty and rammed into a bank of cop cars. There was almost no light in the image anymore and dozens of screaming rushing people on Queen Street so what had happened according to the beat cops’ testimony, which was that the beloved Canadian pop star and murder suspect Jay McCarrol had invisibly absconded with the lightning strike victim, could barely be seen. Some pixels maybe somewhat distinguishable from other pixels.

“JJ,” said a voice at his quarter. Detective McCarrol was pressing a hot paper cup of coffee from the corner shop downstairs into his hand.

“How is it this morning?”

Detective McCarrol took a sip from his own cup. “Bad,” he said. “Burnt. Watching this again?”

Johnson started the video again from the beginning. By now they’d both watched it a dozen times since the case file had been passed across their desks yesterday afternoon. “Something’s weird about it, man.”

“You can say that again.”

“Curt and Bobby down in forensics couldn’t get any more out of it. They’re working on getting the footage from just before the accident from the other cameras on the block but they’re not optimistic.”

“Did you go home last night?”

“I was waiting for you to get into the RV,” Johnson said, ignoring the question. He had, but he had slept only an hour. Judging by McCarrol’s unshaven face and misbuttoned shirt, he was in a similar state. “Shall we?”

McCarrol sucked his teeth. “Beat cops first,” he said.

Johnson already knew how that was gonna go, and indeed it did. The staff sergeant had gathered the non-hospitalized guys in the cafeteria. Many of them seemed to be limping with a put-on stiffness, gunning for disability. Their testimony was colorful but largely unhelpful. Johnson didn’t understand, and told them so, how one of the most iconic faces in Canada could drag away a large man who had just been struck by lightning entirely unseen by twenty-six of Toronto’s finest. The cops made it sound like they had shielded their faces from the bright light and when they looked up the perps were gone. They were more bullish than sheepish about it and their body cameras of course revealed nothing before or after the transformer explosion because they were cheap pieces of shit worn by incompetent losers.

McCarrol smoothed the feathers that were left ruffled whenever detectives asked sensible fucking questions or expected honest policing from the guys on the street and followed Johnson down the hall. “You could be nicer,” he said.

“I don’t understand, like literally cannot wrap my head around, how this is even happening. We’re not dealing with some kind of criminal mastermind here. We’re talking about the guy whose only good song has a chorus that rhymes ‘down’ with ‘down.’ Every police hotline in this country should be blowing up with sightings of this man. We shouldn’t even be in this mess and we wouldn’t be if those guys had done their jobs!”

“You’re not having fun?”

It was nice to get the periodic reminders that he was also a psycho. “A man is dead, McCarrol, and four beat cops are in the hospital.”

“Yeah, but it’s not every day that we get one like this.”

The case was too high-profile, the media were circling like vultures, so the RV was still in the garage of the police department headquarters, not yet towed out to the impound lot on the edge of the city. The nerdy guy who oversaw the evidence greeted them at the elevator and walked them over. “Lots of jury-rigged electronics, but everything’s inert, no explosives,” he explained. “I can’t get anything to boot up, it probably all got fried in the power surge.”

“What do you think all the electronic stuff was for?”

“Honestly no idea,” said the nerd. “I’ve seen a lot of crazy shit. So have you guys! But this is beyond the pale.”

Johnson got a few pictures, standing in the door. Place was outfitted like grandma’s three-season camp in Muskoka—wood paneling, kitschy art, photos of kids in Halloween costumes, framed vinyl records. But what with the loss of electrical caused by the power surge, it was illuminated with full-on portable crime scene floodlights.

McCarrol’s rubber gloves snapped against his wrist. They stepped inside. “Smells crazy in here,” Johnson announced.

“Get off the internet, my friend,” said McCarrol. He’d gone right to the bunk beds perplexingly situated at the back of the RV, purple flashlight blazing in search of harvestable bodily fluids.

“What do you mean get off the internet? You know I’m barely on the internet.”

“What a bold-faced lie. Lying to your partner of two decades? The gall! The audacity…”

Johnson investigated the stack of singed electronics—DVD players?—by the similarly singed refrigerator. Glass tinkled underfoot. He carefully picked up a large piece, sniffed it… orange? Moved on. There was a little upright piano in here, McCarrol would like that. On top of it a few framed photos had fallen on their faces. Johnson lifted one and—

“Mac?”

“Yeah?”

“Take a look at this.”

Johnson heard his partner’s knees crack as he got to his feet in the back of the RV. Faintly grinned. They weren’t as young as they used to be. When they were as young as the guys in the photo, they’d been in the academy, running ropes courses every other day, unloading pistols at the shooting range, reading Foucault’s Discipline and Punish because they knew it would make them mad. It was hard to imagine being that young now.

“Oh,” said McCarrol over Johnson’s shoulder. “There they are.”

“There they are.”

The handsome scruffy brunet in the photo was just a few years out from being the Jay McCarrol who burst onto MuchMusic with “Never Come Down.” Standing beside him was a blond guy with a demonic smile under his trilby hat who was about twenty years out from being struck by lightning on Queen Street.

---

---

---

2.

On the way up to northern Manitoba, Matt mostly slept. Shivery dreams wracked him, wrecked and racked him, but he kept breathing. Jay drove the speed limit and listened to the police blotter and the news which described he himself committing a cold-blooded murder he could not recall. This new information was not in any way shocking when it arrived, though he did not remember pulling any trigger. Of course something like that was happening, because the world was already ending.

Jay had already long since disposed of his and Matt’s iPhones, even though Matt’s had been fried in the lightning strike. He drove, following instructions he’d printed out years ago and hidden in the glove box, as long as it was light, then they stopped to sleep overnight with the truckers at a remote rest area an hour out from Thunder Bay. He woke not feeling much rested with Matt looking at him and remembered everything again in a similar great shocking lightning flood. Matt was struggling to string words together sensibly, rubbing the vibrant red rash across his chest inside his shirt.

“Don’t touch it,” Jay said. “Does it hurt?”

“Hurt kind of doesn’t but itches,” said Matt.

Matt. That was him, really alive, close and here, the world sang. That was his voice, those were his eyes.

“How’s your head?”

“Head kind of doesn’t but itches!”

He smelled singed still. Otherwise normal. Jay had forgotten about his smell. He had thought he had found it, some semblance of it, in other people before, but he had been wrong. Here it was, the wellspring.

In the quiet parking lot cicadas sang. He inhaled deeply of the evening air. He darted into the bathroom to piss and fill their jugs of water. Moths buzzed the fluorescent light. Then they were off again into the night. It was not yet dawn, but almost. It would get lighter earlier as they got further north.

“Didn’t know you I this of capable,” said Matt as they pulled back out onto the highway. “You didn’t capable I know of this. Fuck! Didn’t I know you capable of this?”

He was close to tears with frustration. Jay still knew that somehow. It had been almost twenty years and he looked the same but so different and that was the face of frustration close to tears. “That’s alright, MJ,” Jay said. “Just keep trying.”

“Beating heart’s fucked clock like. Ha ha.”

“Don’t do Withnail and I, man, that’s a cheap shot.”

They drove on. Matt found classical music on the radio—Rachmaninoff! Wow. At seven AM the news bulletin played a snippet of “Never Come Down” before segueing into a soundbite about a national manhunt. No new information, no details about the truck, no details about Matt—all good.

“Bitch goddamn unsatisfactory of a situation,” Matt observed.

“Brokeback Mountain? Are you serious? Or do you have Tourettes for real now.”

“Disabled ever would I be to pretend? Do who you am I think?”

They drove on. Matt slept. Woke up with a jerk so potent Jay reflexively swerved and nearly crashed the truck. “You’re dreaming,” he said. “You’re okay. You got hit by lightning. Do you remember?”

“No! That have established we don’t no I remember bird!”

Bird! Heavenly light went through him. Sometimes fans called him that and it made him feel sick to his stomach. Now it powered him through the terrifying errand of stopping to pump gas.

They drove on. Every time Jay passed a police car he was certain this was the end. It simply had to be going wrong soon; it was already improbable that they had gotten this far. Once a cop went barreling by on the eastbound side of the highway, lights and sirens going, drowning out Shostakovich on the radio. Jay’s heart rate kicked up somehow even faster. They went on in white-knuckling silence for a while until it became clear nothing was going to happen. Then Matt fell asleep again.

Jay figured he had prepared for this for a long time. Literally, sure, but also just in his relative comfort with what living in a state of fear and anticipation did to the human body. Waiting in the wings just offstage when the lights went down, hearing the crowd explode, hearing somebody push open the artfully ajar door in the private bathhouse rooms, hearing the lock snick behind them, this same thing would happen to the heart, the high adrenalized hum, like you’d gotten hit by that giant needle from Pulp Fiction. Years ago, watching that with Matt in the Queen Street apartment, the precious and rare and delicious silence having fallen upon them in the moments of high tension, Matt sitting beside him with his knees drawn up to his chest, grinning—he would always gasp theatrically when Uma Thurman’s bra was revealed and then laugh hysterically when she woke up gasping for air and started throwing herself around the room.

Night fell. Orange highway lights washed over Matt’s face, the marks on his neck and jaw. They were already in the Walmart lot and parked before Jay woke Matt up with a hand on his bare knee through the rip in his jeans. He was gentle and trepidatious as though there would be some residual charge in Matt but it was only normal human skin, which was warm and soft, lightly furred with coarse clear hairs. It was two in the morning.

“I’ve got to go in and get supplies,” Jay said.

The whites of Matt’s eyes in the thin parking lot light were sticky liquid, frantic. “Fucking wanted man dude you’re like.”

“You can’t go in, Matt, you can barely walk.” Jay pulled the camo balaclava over his head.

“Butch hunter cosplay,” said Matt.

“Hey, that was three words in the right order. Good job.”

“What supposed am I do to?”

“Stay right here. Don’t go anywhere. Do you want anything?”

Matt’s arms were crossed over his chest skeptically. “Loop fruits,” he said.

Jay was nervous going in, but it was the middle of the night and this was rural Manitoba. Nobody in the store looked at him twice. He piled food, medical supplies, hunting supplies into the cart. He used the self checkout methodically, careful to scan each item, and paid in cash. He calmly pushed the cart out to the car. His heart was beating quite quickly again, he could feel it in his throat. He loaded everything into the trunk except for the box of Froot Loops he brought up front with Matt. They ate it from the box with their hands, licking sugar off their fingers like they were kids again. The light in the cab went out and they ate quietly in the dim orange streetlight.

It was so quiet here. Half a tank of gas left. They’d have to stop at least once more. They should move on soon. They would likely have to keep running now until they died. Wasn’t fair but nothing was. Getting everything you ever imagined and being a husk of yourself for fifteen years and just now when you were a wanted man on the run having it turned back on, like literally feeling life pouring back into your mind and hands, sensitizing you, wasn’t fair, but what was?

Matt had kicked him out almost twenty years ago. They’d fought. Called each other all sorts of names. Hurt each other badly. Matt had said he’d seen Jay write that on the whiteboard, don’t play the Rivoli. Was he stupid? But it was Jay’s handwriting. Matt had told him to get out and Jay had called his bluff. He’d gone to his mother’s house and finished the song and laid in bed for a week wholly intending to go back, but when he did, Matt had changed the locks. He’d pounded on the door for a while. He’d been drunk. The next evening, still hungover, he had started going to open mics. He had known that would hurt Matt worse than anything else he could do. Imagining him bloodied in the hospital was not even as delicious as imagining him stumbling into this very bar watching helplessly as Jay was adored by others. That was enough to fuel him for a time. That was why the first album was actually good. But, like people said about heroin, you had to keep upping the dose over time or you would stop feeling high and start feeling sick. That was when Jay discovered the bathhouses.

They drove on. They weren’t followed. The night was warm, breezy. Heading north now on the narrow two-lane highway, Jay dared to put the window down and stick his elbow out. “Feral imagine used to were we kids,” Matt said dreamily, half asleep. The breeze stirred his fluffy hair. Jay was getting used to this way of talking, the way it was almost musical. “Wolves by raised,” said Matt.

“Remember when we slept in the park?”

“Parents your panic had attack,” said Matt. “Mine were thrilled.”

“It was a beautiful night. Big orange moon. I don’t know if you noticed, but there was a song about this on the first album.”

“Noticed I course of. Bunnies we up were curled like little.”

“That’s very sweet Matt.”

Morning developed out of the clouds. Smoke from distant wildfires made the sun seem pinkish and distant, like a weird eye, and the highway narrowed still. The places they went through were not so much towns as temporary camps. This did not seem like exactly the same Canada in which they both had been born and spent nearly their entire lives. Jay refilled the gas from one of the emergency canisters in the trunk before they came across a truck stop, restocked, got coffees, stale doughnuts, disappeared into the smoke again.

“Tired you aren’t?”

Matt was rubbing his chest where his heart was. Jay had tried to tell him not to drink that coffee. “I’m exhausted,” he said, “but we’re almost to the airstrip.”

“Used to diva such a be.”

Such a be—what a funny phrase. Flowed so nice. Diva such a be.

“You wanna drive?”

“Fly like a seeing, fractal like fly-mirror eyes. Seeing. Like. Fly. Eyes. Mean what I know?”

“I know what you mean.”

The further northwest they got the more the road was cracked and potholed. They couldn’t afford to bust a tire, not this far out, not with the diminished physical capacities of a person who had had every hard thing done for him for fifteen years and a person who had just been struck by lightning. Jay slowed down, carefully avoided the potholes as best he could.

“Mario Kart like,” said Matt. Jay laughed. That felt good! One weird thing that had happened over the past two decades was the way that the Overton window on feelings had been shifted. When everything felt good—high thread-count sheets, air conditioning, silk and linen, Lexapro, the most expensive vibrating dildo money could buy, caviar, champagne, even that sinfully beautiful and innocent edible songbird, more than once—nothing did…

Then Matt said, “What happened?”

How was it possible they had not yet had this conversation? They had had to get out of the blast radius of the place where it, wherever it was, had happened, before they could. One of them could barely speak. And it was so impossible, so improbable, so… it didn’t necessarily feel like it had really happened, even as this was really happening, somehow, incontrovertibly. Jay had pinched himself enough times to know that for sure, pinching himself to keep himself awake, to wake himself up if this was a dream too. There was a tiny bruise beside the bone at the back of his wrist now. “I don’t know either,” said Jay.

“Do how you know not either?”

“I don’t ei— don’t know that. Either.” Matt’s scrambled diction was transforming something in Jay’s brain. “I just… woke up and you were—and I was in that weird RV. Had you ever seen that thing before?”

“VR?”

“The—never mind.”

“Angel like a light you thought—bird. We’re dead?”

“Maybe. Maybe, that would explain a lot actually…”

He was thinking about it, there indeed being something purgatorial about this place that was so purely Canada it didn’t feel like Canada, but Matt was going on. “Myself to do why that? Lightning? Hurt. Man. Hurts! In not—psychic break? Mind right? Never right been in mind, say would some, you maybe, you did say probably, ha ha, times many…”

“I don’t know why you did that,” Jay said. “I don’t know why I—I don’t know what happened. I don’t even know why I fucking… did you hear on the radio? Killed my guitarist, they’re saying.”

“Wasn’t he well that good,” said Matt, folding his arms over his chest again. “Got have should guy you that on had ‘Blue Dreams.’”

“Blue Dreams” was a song ghostwritten by The Weeknd on a shitty “concept album” Reid had pressed Jay into making post-Lemonade. Jay would have gladly made a concept album about something like mythical folk figures of Toronto legend, the films of David Lynch, a childhood friendship gone wrong, or the warehouse and bathhouse scenes, but these suggestions were swiftly quashed and the big guns were called in to craft a boring “song cycle” about a failed relationship, as though anybody needed to do that after Beyonce.

“You follow my music?” Jay asked Matt.

“Follow I do your—fucking your biggest fan I am! Been always have I fan your biggest!”

It should have been vindicating to hear that Matt had never gotten over him but Jay only felt the reopening of the ancient wound. “You kicked me out of our band!”

Matt flexed his annoyingly buff folded arms. Jay hit a pothole. “Dramatic was being I.”

“Who’s the diva now, Matt! You changed the locks on me. I did all of this to spite you. You never tried—twenty years? You just listen?”

“Letters I wrote—”

“Do you know how many fucking letters I get?”

“Sorry. You. Got. Every. Thing. You. Wanted,” said Matt. Each word felt and sounded like it took him tremendous effort. The melody was slow, stilted, ragged; Jay could feel it in his left hand.

“I didn’t get everything I wanted.”

“No?”

Big guns! The bazooka. “I wanted to play the Rivoli with you.”

It had been years since he’d had an actual argument in which something was truly at stake. It had been even longer since he had felt reflexively through his own body, the heat through his skin, Matt’s frustration rising. They had known each other for ten years, lost touch twenty years ago, but he recognized that feeling and felt its sympathetic echo in himself, something like fear, something else like… “You I saw!” Matt shouted. Even this fuck off big truck suddenly felt like it couldn’t contain him anymore. The whole world was too small for him. “Fucking saw I you.”

“I know you think you saw me! I don’t know what to tell you. It wasn’t me! I wouldn’t—I didn’t—it was the same me who shot Luke.”

A searching chill went bodily up him. His eyes felt hot for some reason. Matt was just staring through the mosquito-flecked windshield at the horizon. So it was going to be the silent treatment.

“Lightning strikes can cause lapses of memory,” Jay made up on the spot. It sounded like something that was possibly correct. “That explains what’s happening to you. And I had to physically separate you from the cable and the box. I must have gotten a shock of it somehow.” He decided to believe this was true even though it was just the before-part that was a blank, he remembered doing that bit quite clearly, somehow fearlessly, aloft on an unreal joy, angels singing, all panic and screaming and sparking subsumed into percussion, beautiful symphony filling the world—running out of the cab of the RV to Matt’s side, pulling him to his feet, pulling the hot rubbery cables and pliers out of his hands, shoving him, running, breath screaming in his lungs, didn’t know where he was going or why, just that he was running, and that Matt was with him, again, finally, after so long—but this was what they did together, they ran, the wind was at their backs—it was almost as though they had never been parted—

---

---

---

They’d been in the Bridle Path before, but this was something else. Halfway up the driveway, trying not to ooh and aah, feeling remarkably underdressed, they were greeted by a peaky-faced man who came out a side door of the big house looking like a very heavy weight had recently been lifted off him. “You must be the detectives.”

“I’m Detective Johnson.” They flashed their badges as people had come to expect from television shows. “This is Detective McCarrol.”

“No relation,” said McCarrol, smiling.

“Wow,” said the guy. His eyes were scrolling over McCarrol the way most human eyes naturally did, soaking in, absorbing something pleasurable. “Are you sure? You even kind of resemble…”

“I get that a lot. But I actually play jazz piano.” 

“Like Bill Evans?”

“Like Oscar Peterson,” said Johnson. McCarrol rolled his eyes, flexed his fingers. Sometimes Johnson allowed himself to be cajoled into coming along when the rest of the guys went to go see McCarrol play at open mic nights at piano bars across the city.

“You must be Reid,” said McCarrol, still smiling. He was so good at disarming people with his handsome normalness. “Thanks for talking to us. I know you’ve probably answered a lot of questions for the Toronto police by now.”

“Happy to do it,” said Reid. “Come on, come inside.”

Inside was hollow and cavernous. Most of the hanging implements in the kitchen looked like they had never been used. Decoration was scant. The tour bus had already been combed for evidence, statements had been taken, paperwork had been carried out in large boxes, and now the dust was settling. The quiet was ear-ringingly loud. Reid sat them down on stools at the kitchen island and opened the fridge. “Coconut water?”

“Normal water?” said Johnson.

Reid removed a bottle from the refrigerator and looked at it. “I only have… hyper-ionized water.”

Under the island, McCarrol stepped hard on Johnson’s foot. He hadn’t even realized the ticker tape inside his brain was about to start spilling over until the quick, sharp pain stopped it. “That’s great,” he said. “Thank you.”

Reid poured the hyper-ionized water into a glass for Johnson and poured another glass of coconut water for McCarrol. “I’m happy to do whatever I can to help the investigation,” he said. “But when they said you were coming, I was curious. I already gave my statement. I didn’t think there was any doubt.”

“His guilt has to be proven in a court of law,” Johnson said. It was weird how people always seemed to forget about the whole innocent until proven guilty thing. “We have to find him so that that can happen.”

“We’re trying to figure out what happened in the chase. We think that’ll help us find him.”

“Something happened in the chase besides him getting away?”

“Do you know who this man is?” said McCarrol. He had pulled up on his phone the image of pop star and hat guy in their twenties that Johnson had found in the RV before they had even left the car and now he was passing it across the table to Reid.

“That’s Matt,” Reid said immediately. “Matt something or other, I don’t remember his last name. I haven’t seen him for… well, I just saw him actually, after the concert the other night. Before that, not for years. I barely knew him, but he and Jay were in a band together in their teens, twenties. It never went anywhere owing to his, I mean Matt’s, frankly almost unbelievably noxious personality. Matt kicked Jay out of the band for reasons I never understood, and almost right away he wrote ‘Never Come Down.’”

Matthew was Detective Johnson’s middle name, which he had used in school and through college until the academy. It had been years since he’d felt the guilty fission of sharing a name with a perp, but here it was.

“You said you just saw him,” said Johnson.

“Yeah—the first night of tour at the RBC, earlier this week. There was an afterparty at the bar around the corner. He was there. I hadn’t even thought about him for years. He looked like shit, honestly. Jay didn’t want anything to do with him. He kind of laughed it off, but I could tell he was rattled. He’d been acting kind of weird, well, weirder than usual, the couple days before the shooting.”

“Had they been in contact in the interim years, to your knowledge?” McCarrol asked.

“Not to my knowledge. I guess anything is possible. I’ve been wondering how much I ever really knew Jay, honestly.”

“I know this must be really upsetting for you.”

“You have no idea.”

People always said that, but Johnson and McCarrol had some idea. Johnson sometimes wanted to say that, had once or twice, but McCarrol would give him a sour look, so he stopped. They had seen some horrible things. Earlier this year, he had watched as McCarrol paused while bagging some knives as evidence at a murder site, stood up, cracked his back, calmly walked outside, and puked. Johnson had followed him and taken his gloves off and squeezed the back of McCarrol’s neck in a cold hand. He’d felt like puking too but to do this was grounding. They were getting too old for this. It was like radiation, piling up inside them both, all the terrible, awful, senseless, endless things.

“Did Jay have an RV?” McCarrol was asking.

“An RV?” Reid laughed. “That’s not really how the rich vacation these days.”

Johnson’s turn to slide over the photos on his phone. “He was driving this in the chase. Seen it before?”

Reid soaked up the pictures as Johnson scrolled, then looked up incredulously. “He was driving this?”

“That’s one thing that eyewitness testimony absolutely substantiates.”

“He’s a horrible driver. Atrocious. He should never have been licensed. And the decor—” Reid ducked his head and scrolled through the images again. “It’s all very unlike Jay. Look around this place—he was into the Kardashian-core minimalism. This is kind of like what their old apartment was like, Jay and Matt’s, on Queen Street.”

“They lived together on Queen?” said McCarrol. He was taking shorthand notes in his little book, nodding along with the sympathetic furrowed brow.

“For three years maybe? Around 2007, 2008. Near the Rivoli, you know it?”

“They got a great BLT at the Rivoli,” said McCarrol, scribbling.

“Could it have been Matt’s RV?” Johnson asked.

“Probably. Like I said, I barely knew him, but that strikes me as something that he would do. He had family money… no idea from where. Lucky for him, because he was kind of a talentless loser.”

Johnson could picture McCarrol’s chicken scratch handwriting rendering the words talentless loser.

Reid passed Johnson’s phone back. “This is sort of interesting and all,” he said, “but why are you interested in Matt? I thought you were coming to ask me about the gay sex parties.”

McCarrol sighed minutely. His pencil scratched on the paper. Johnson could hear the round shape of a question mark. “What gay sex parties,” Johnson asked Reid.

A mousy thing, frantic and excited, had gotten into Reid’s peaky face. He was thrilled that his employer had finally made a large enough moral breach to allow him to make his own. In small minds, some things immediately became wrong when the person who did those things was bad.

They listened and McCarrol took notes as Reid described a seedy underbelly of the city that they knew very well was there. Ten or so years ago, couple of bodies had washed up in the swamps by the harbor lighthouse, young guys in colorful party clothes, loaded on MDMA. If you’d been a dissolute and confused young man you couldn’t help but see some of yourself in those faces, feel some of yourself in the wind tunnel slog through the warehouse district where people looked for love and connection and found the simulacrum that could be located in sex and drugs. The hungry young brain suspending its natural primal fear, reaching out a shaky hand, feeling a touch that suddenly turned sharp. They found the killer after four months, six bodies. After they put the guy in the paddy wagon and slammed the door McCarrol had put his warm hand between Johnson’s shoulderblades, drawing the poison out.

Reid described the tableau in salacious tones. Pop star Jay slipping out, leaving his phone, not taking any of his fancy cars—“AirTags in every one of them,” Reid let on, “of course”—disappearing for a day or two, coming back “looking like a dog’s chew toy. And you don’t want to know the state of his clothes.” McCarrol’s ever-mobile eyebrows had drifted halfway to his hairline.

“Once he disappeared for a week,” Reid said. “I thought he was dead. Probably would have made things easier.”

Editorializing. He looked between them for approval. Johnson didn’t like this guy.

After a few more questions they said their goodbyes and walked back up the street to the car. “Guess what I’m thinking,” said McCarrol.

“You want to go undercover at the gay orgy.”

“How’s that gonna work? Hey guy, want a handjob? By the way, have you seen these men? Where would we even put the picture?”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d get all the attention.”

“Johnson, I think you’ll find that within a certain subset of the gay community, you are a physical ideal.”

“How do you know that?”

McCarrol looked him up and down with a sardonic expression. “Please.”

Johnson didn’t know what to do with that, so he did nothing. “You’re thinking we should have lunch at the Rivoli,” he said.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” said McCarrol, “but yeah, let’s do it. No, I was thinking that I don’t like that guy.”

“Ugh. Me neither.”

It was sticky and had begun to lightly rain. As they walked up the street curtains twitched in the windows of more than a few mansions.

“What are we thinking for motive?” said Johnson.

“Motive for the murder or the attempted vehicular manslaughter of twenty Toronto beat cops?”

Johnson tossed a hand. “I think that was heat of the moment. What about you?”

“He saw Matt and acted reflexively. I understand that. But why was Matt—not what you’re asking.”

“Totally different question, Mac, but we’ll get there. Motive for the murder.”

“You tell me. You ever want to kill your partner? A band must feel like that.”

Johnson had never wanted to kill McCarrol, but he had often imagined various permutations of them dying in each other’s arms. The stray slug under the bulletproof vest. Dark blood against the navy blue uniform jacket. Dark blood on the lips. Warmth, darkness. Maybe the living one would rock the dying one a little, whisper some soothing words. The hallucinatory opiate end-of-life chemicals released by the struggling brainstem would enable the confession of secrets. “Tensions boiling over?”

“Maybe.”

“You ever wanna kill me?”

“Haha. Sometimes.”

“Do you think the band knew about his… proclivities?” Johnson wondered aloud. “They’d probably signed NDAs too, but that’s a lot of leverage.”

“You don’t think this country could handle a gay pop star?”

“Maybe a monogamous one.”

“Where’s the fun in that?”

“Whatever the case,” said Johnson, “having to sneak out to fuck seems to have made him pretty skilled at evading notice.”

“I’m getting the sense of a fairly sad person, J.”

“How so?”

“Isolated, you know. He didn’t have friends, just handlers. His only human interaction aside from managers and fans is anonymous gay sex at underground parties that said handlers just love to guilt him for going to. And in a moment of crisis he sees somebody who means something to him, somebody he lived with back when life was warm, and he throws everything away—I mean, you know what happens to cop killers! All for the psycho in the hat. It’s like a wild leap to be free from loneliness. I think the murder was the same thing. I think something happened in his mind, some snap, and he wanted out so badly, he couldn’t stand it anymore.”

Johnson didn’t say anything. His brain was circling that beautiful idea. Back when life was warm.

“Just a feeling,” said McCarrol, embarrassed.

“You might be taking all this a little bit personally. This guy being your secret cousin, and all.”

“It could have been me if I had gone to piano school. It’s why I didn’t go to piano school.”

“Piano school!”

“I got into Berklee College of Music in the States. In Boston. I almost went!”

“How come I didn’t know that?”

“We tend to keep our personal and professional lives separate, don’t we, J?”

They got in the car after a brief tussle over who was driving. The seat and mirrors were already adjusted for McCarrol’s long legs and torso so Johnson let him have it.

“I guess we’ve got to get intel on the psycho in the hat,” Johnson said, scrolling through the radio as they turned out onto Bayview.

“How many 40 year old Matts can there be in Toronto?”

“It’d be funny if it was Matt Johnson, wouldn’t it?”

“Why?”

“That’s my name! Well, that’s what I went by in school.”

McCarrol guffawed. “I always forget that. You just so don’t look like a Matt to me.”

“What do I look like?”

“You’re Johnson! You’re J, you’re JJ! Wait, what was that?”

“What?”

“On the radio. Go back.” Johnson did, quickly finding some ‘90s CanCon bullshit. McCarrol’s favorite. “Crank it up,” he announced.

“You’re such a Canadian cliche!”

“This song is good!”

“You’re insane. How do you have an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz and love this shit?”

“Coming from the guy who has one stack of 1960s French philosophy books and one stack of first person shooter video games at home?” McCarrol laughed. “The guy who has racks of dumbbells next to an antique record cabinet full of Steve Reich and Terry Riley?”

Johnson’s face was hot. “I like working out to that stuff, Mac, and clearly you haven’t read any French philosophy if you don’t understand the appeal of FPS to the frustrated human urge for violence—and anyway, we’re not talking about me. We’re talking about you!”

McCarrol batted Johnson’s hand away and turned up the radio for the song’s coda. Other people talked about things being “so bad it’s good,” but Johnson had never understood this frame of thinking. Bad was bad, and good was good. The messy harmonies were a music theory cheat code to stir pathos in the human brain and the gigantic drums were just stupid, so ‘90s, but maybe there was something interesting to the lyrics:

I think my love for her makes me miss the point
I miss the point
I miss the point

“I feel like we’re missing the point,” Johnson confessed. “I can’t shake the feeling that something isn’t as it seems.”

“I know, said McCarrol. “The evidence isn’t adding up. Motive’s flimsy. A rich person can disappear, temporarily at least, but what about Matt, why Matt? We still haven’t even tried to figure out what Matt was doing on the CN Tower. Conducting the electricity—it’s too coherent to be a schizophrenic delusion, but not coherent enough to make sense.”

“The people aren’t adding up, Mac. Our pop star went through a complete personality flip. He wanted nothing to do with this guy just a few days ago. Something happened. Something we don’t understand.”

They cut across town on St. Clair. Sticky summer city acting shellshocked. Johnson pressed his aching forehead against the cool windowglass. He reminded himself he loved this place, these people, every one; this was why he got up and kept doing this every day, even when it made him feel like his brain was breaking.

“I need to think,” said McCarrol.

“Yeah. Me too.”

McCarrol hit the left on Dufferin. “I do my best thinking at the piano,” he said lightly, not looking at Johnson. “Want to come over?”

---

---

---

3.

The fishing camp on Monroe Lake was quiet, still, smelled musty. These places always kind of looked the same—dark wood, red plaid, yellow-gold light. Jay hadn’t had the inclination to hire a decorator for his apocalypse hideout shack, figuring that this somewhat negated the purpose, but he was comforted by its cozy warmth. For years he’d been living in and with the trendy minimalism that was popular among interior designers these days. At first he’d tried—maybe just, uh, one? lamp shaped like a duck?—but Reid and the beautiful artsy people he had hired for purposes of their taste had laughed when Jay had described the kitschy stuff he wanted.

Matt valiantly made his own way inside from the dock but promptly laid down on the couch. A sentence Jay heard his mother say inside his head was it’s certainly been a long and tiring day. He got the generator running and brought Matt a glass of water and carried in all the Walmart supplies and made up the bed with the heartwarmingly cliche red flannel sheets and steered Matt there. There were other things to do, and they both should have showered, and Jay was itching to tune the piano, but it was sunset, and the silence was ear-ringing, hypnotic. Up here it was already autumn. The colorful birds were gone. Through the wide windows in the bedroom the lake and woods outside looked like an unfinished Group of Seven painting. White evening sky reflecting on the rippling water. Loons, their haunting psychedelic gibberish moans and cries floating in the stillness.

“Is this okay,” said Jay.

“What is,” said Matt.

Jay let his knee weight the mattress behind Matt’s back. “Oh,” said Matt, closing his eyes. Tension eased from his face. “Yes.”

Tomorrow, eons off, they might wake up surrounded by Mounties. Reid pounding on the door, jostling the handle: “What have you done now?” Jay’s heart rate at last was slowing down. He’d forgotten it could beat that slow. He put his other knee on the mattress and laid down and pulled the covers over them and no sooner had he closed his eyes than he was asleep. No dreams. Darkness stole them away and they floated on the raft of music.

Jay woke up after a long time, looking at the back of Matt’s neck. He lay there for a while, syncing their breathing, patiently pushing every arriving thought that was not of the back of Matt’s neck firmly from his mind.

Sometimes you spend almost twenty years looking for something you lost, and then the universe serves it to you, burning, scrambled, but otherwise the same. You get inured to getting things you want, so much so that getting the things you want has become vastly uninteresting. To have gotten the wished-for thing back slightly wrong and different is a stroke of luck beyond imagining. Not that, in the interim years, Jay had actually done anything to deserve this, far from it, probably the opposite in fact. But here it was.

The day was still and cold. Mist had settled on the lake. An unanticipated side effect of having disposed of their cell phones was having no conception of what time or even what day it was. He realized belatedly he ought to have asked the pilot when she dropped them off. It was entirely plausible that they had slept for more than a day.

He showered, keeping the water cool to wake himself up slightly. The body attached to him, with the graying wiry hair, the regrettable tattoos focus group studies had suggested back in the 2010s, the soft paunch that had recently had Reid sending him articles about GLP-1s, looked the same, but felt different somehow. He got dressed. He made oatmeal and instant coffee. He ate on the small porch, sitting on the stairs out to the dock. It was cold. Loons called. Man, birds were something else for music. Each had a few different melodic runs completely outside any standard palette of scales, notes, and chords known to humans. He listened for a while and then he went inside. He cleaned the dishes. He looked in on Matt asleep. He had turned onto his back. His face was loose and the staticky flannel sheets had frizzed up his hair into a halo. Jay thought about going to him and loosening the collar of his shirt but knew he would not be able to stop himself there. He closed the bedroom door and made another cup of coffee and sat down at the piano.

It was unusual for him to have not played for so many days. Back before, even when he was away from the little upright in his bedroom suite or the baby grand in the ballroom or the concert Bosendorfer in the studio or the Yamaha he played on tour, he had a piano app on his phone he would fiddle with, sometimes with AirPods in, lying in an unfamiliar bed beside someone he’d picked up at a warehouse party. Before the first stint in rehab for cocaine he had felt pretty sick and tired of the instrument. He had thought about burning the baby grand, which he had bought after having been awake for four days. He had realized he felt about it the way he had once felt about Matt. He was terrified by how much he craved the feeling of captivity to the music that was inside it. He had crawled under it, back into the womb, and passed out. Reid had found him and that was a trip to the elite and discreet detox place in Willowdale booked and blessed.

Here in the cabin he lifted the fall board and tentatively pressed the middle C. A little clunky, like any good wooden upright, and mostly in tune, close enough for jazz. Without wholly intending to, his fingers drifted into a chord he didn’t think he had ever played before in a lifetime’s touching this instrument almost every single day. That chord moved into another one. He spent a few minutes trying to mimic the loon call, the seagullish croak on the left hand and the ghostly scream on the right. He played the melody Matt had showed him in a dream in 2008, which he had been a prisoner to ever since. He played “Time” by David Bowie. He played “Sinnerman” by Nina Simone until the perennial unsolvedness of the where you gonna run to question started freaking him out. Then he played “Feeling Alright” by Joe Cocker:

Seems I got to have a change of scene
Every night I have the strangest dream…

When he looked up Matt was standing in the doorway, leaning up against the lintel, watching him. Time shrunk down to the space of a single breath. “Good sounds,” he said. Then he kind of sagged. Jay got up and steered him back into the bedroom and sat him on the bed, loosened the collar of his shirt. He was so warm. Breathing hard. His dark eyes followed Jay’s hands.

“Was better was listening thought I could been so long,” he was saying softly. The flowy gibberish phrases were somehow soothing. “So long. Play you heard. Body-no plays like. Words thinking. Skits. Used we like to.”

“We’ll do that again another time, okay? You just have to rest and get better.”

“Better get,” said Matt. Jay carefully pushed the singed blue button-up off over his shoulders and helped pull the sleeves over his hands. He would happy to be around Matt again even if he didn’t look like this now but holy hell. And he smelled so good. And his mouth—his lips. His eyes which were so dark, so hot, so alive, moved so fast.

There had to be something evolutionarily programmed about this, the sudden huge wanting in the wake of near-disaster. Jay thought about tracing all the painful red marks on Matt’s arms and chest to their source, wherever that was. Maybe that would feel good. Maybe Matt would squirm, tremble, his hot breath— Instead Jay said, “You want to take a shower?”

“Me help to you want?”

“Yes, I’ll help you.”

Matt just blinked at him. “We’re dead, bird,” he said again. “Dreaming.”

Few more days went by like this. Jay learned how the house worked and scouted the lakeshore nearby. He found the loons’ nests and picked a few last wild blackberries. He played the piano, made oatmeal and ramen noodles, rubbed Matt’s oversensitive hands with liniment from the Winnipeg Walmart that made his own fingers tingle. A week in another floatplane landed and some people fished out of it for a few hours and left again. Matt slept. Sometimes he came and sat on the couch while Jay played and then he fell asleep again there. After another few days they together made it out onto the dock. They sat down and put their feet in the freezing cold water for all of two seconds. They listened to the loons.

“Why get them they call that,” said Matt.

“Loons?”

“Loony.”

Jay leaned back on the heels of his hands. By now he had noticed the tattoo on Matt’s upper arm. He’d clearly gotten it before putting all that muscle on and his own young and somewhat idealized face and signature were stretched almost beyond recognition. It was difficult not to stare at it. At the fine hairs standing on end in the cool breeze. At the red marks, which, heartbreakingly, were starting to fade. Difficult not to obsessively repeat the refrain of a stray thought that had crossed his mind the other day, difficult to play anything else on the piano, difficult to keep from saying aloud: he belongs to me.

“Want to play some music?” said Jay.

“Somewhere house this in got you a set-drum?”

“Pots and pans. And I found a bucket. No, I mean the vox!”

They left wet footprints on the bleached cedarwood, going inside. “Noticed know don’t if have you,” said Matt, “vox little now but garde avant right.”

“Yeah, I think it’s cool.” Jay sat down at the piano and lifted the fall board. His heart was beating fast again. Behind him he could hear Matt gingerly stand up on the couch, testing its give and bounce. “I’ve been writing songs with the same three chords for years. Well, other people have been writing songs with the same three chords and I’ve been playing them…”

“Aural biohacking,” said Matt. “It’s a psy-op.”

“Hey, good job!”

“Play you gonna chords before ever nobody heard!”

Jay played the one from the other day. Maximum fingers in it. He could feel Matt’s eyes on the back of his neck.

“Nice.”

“It’s a cool one.” He tried a step up, step down. “Just try to talk,” he said, trying to conceal the excitement he knew was in his voice. “It’ll be good for you to practice.”

“What about talk?”

“Well, what do you remember about that night?”

“Weird how that hurt,” Matt said. “Being like a lightbulb. Filaments. You seeing. We’re maybe dead didn’t even but that think then. You just. Wow! You. Happy to see me, you. How? Running then—how?”

“I really don’t know how. Smoke was coming out of your head.” Jay played the discordant sound of it, the fear and elation and confusion, the feeling of having slipped an unseen collar. “Nobody even chased us. I don’t even know how I was thinking straight. The last thing I remember before that was waking up in my bed at home.” Well, waking up in the silk sheets, weirdly charged up, restless, putting on his heated eye mask, and jerking off, but Matt didn’t need to know that.

“Got us someone there,” said Matt. “Moved our bodies.”

“Who moves our bodies if not us? Had that ever happened to you before? Losing time?”

“No. You?”

“Not sober!”

“Asked you haven’t about even rehab. Times how many you go? Poison what’s your? Heroin jumpy too you for. Advil when remember hungover you even wouldn’t take?”

“Can you stay on topic please? Who moved our bodies?”

He heard Matt jounce the couch a few times and then he got down, pacing slowly behind Jay on the squeaky hardwoods. He was doing better walking lately but this was adventurous—Jay couldn’t worry. The music must have been animating and energizing him the same way it did to Jay. He crept the theme up in half-steps toward something he could feel and sense but not quite see.

Matt snapped his fingers. “Said you it,” he said. “Was it you the same whiteboard killed and wrote and Luke and— you the same, not you, different you! Different me, lightning with! Butterfly effect bird, butterfly bird. Different us versions infinity times. Choice every tiny branches! Other some from us other-some branch showed up!”

Making the music follow something this complex was the most challenged Jay had felt at the piano in years. A torch had been dropped deep into his soul or a tap had turned on somewhere or a window had been thrust open. He wasn’t sure he could speak and play at the same time but he managed, “Where then you and me did go?”

“Here!”

“The other ones I mean.”

“Back,” Matt said carefully, “home. Back. Home.”

“Matt,” said Jay, even though he knew, “where’s home if not—not here.” 

“Queen place,” said Matt. Jay stumbled on the keys but quickly found the thread again, unwilling to let it go. Now, he knew, he was duty bound to hold tight to this thread the rest of his life. “Queen back to place,” said Matt again.

“We can’t go back there, Matt.”

“Did they,” said Matt behind him. “Already you have.”

Somebody else somewhere in the vast fabric of spacetime, somebody very like you, is living the life you want. At some point they struggled with their choice and tried something different. Then they did the thing you were unwilling to do when you were young, and they moved heaven and earth to get it back. It would be highly romantic if you were not the leftovers that had been disposed of when they were done. Now what’s left? Just the products of a million little accidents. Just the two of us in this room.

“Hey, hey,” said Matt. That was his burning hand on the nape of Jay’s neck. His own hands had slid off the piano keys. “On faint don’t me,” said Matt. Jay stood up and kissed him.

---

---

---

McCarrol lived in an apartment in a brick brownstone by the train tracks where Dundas turned into Roncesvalles, which Johnson knew, having dropped him off at home before—but he had never been inside.

“How long have you lived here?”

McCarrol shrugged, shouldering in the front door. “Since the academy.”

“That long?”

“I had two roommates back then.”

They went upstairs. The downstairs neighbor was cooking dinner, the hall smelled like Vietnamese spices. McCarrol opened the two locks on his apartment door with different keys like any good cop. When he pushed the door open a tabby cat pushed its head out, looked around, butted McCarrol’s ankles as he scratched its head, looked up at Johnson with confusion, and headed down the stairs, tail held high.

“You have a cat?”

“No.”

“Uh—”

“Come on in.”

Johnson stepped past him in the doorway. It was a nice place, spacious, airy, high ceilings, parquet floors, pretty light fixtures, but it was undecorated to the point of seeming somehow vacant. No pictures on the walls, no curtains on the wide windows. There were five antique paperback Nero Wolfe mysteries in a stack on the third shelf of the built-in bookcase, which was otherwise empty but completely free of dust. Outside the light rail trundled past.

“Make yourself at home,” McCarrol was saying. How? “Water? Or I have beers?”

“Whiskey?”

“You got it.”

Johnson wandered, asking himself what a place like this would tell him about a perp or a victim. McCarrol’s own description of pop star Jay came to mind: I’m getting the sense of a very sad person. In the living room with the empty built-in bookcase was an upright piano and a large blue velveteen couch. Down the hall, a little washroom, with one of those electric razors specifically designed for men to shave their balls plugged in and charging on the counter. The bedroom was at the end of the hall and similarly featureless, almost bleached, except for a red knit blanket thrown over the rumpled white duvet. That was how you set it up when you got in bed needing to lie down, but not expecting to sleep—Johnson knew from experience.

The spare bedroom must have at one time been occupied by the aforementioned roommates, and Johnson hesitated to open the door. If this were a perp’s apartment, there was simply no doubt all the bad things would be in there. He jostled the knob, worried he’d find it locked and never be able to look at his partner the same way again. But the door swung open and revealed an empty room with five or six different thousand-piece puzzles on the floor, all in various stages of completion, each occupying its own carefully demarcated area on the hardwoods. Empty beer cans. A flattened beanbag chair. A red hooded sweatshirt, a pizza crust on a blue glass plate. Johnson’s heart twisted.

McCarrol was at his quarter, pressing a cool glass with two fingers of whiskey into his hand. “Could use your help with some of these,” he said.

“Didn’t take you for a puzzler.” Or a ball-shaver, for that matter, Johnson magnanimously did not say.

“Well, that’s where you find me when you call me late at night.”

They headed back toward the living room and the piano. “I never call you late at night,” Johnson lied.

“It’s just as well. I’m not sleeping either.”

Another thing Johnson magnanimously did not say: I could tell that from the state of your bed.

“Well,” he did say, sitting on the couch, “we’re here to think.”

McCarrol sat down at the piano. He set his glass of whiskey on the built-in bookshelf by the Nero Wolfe mysteries, within arm’s reach, and opened the fall board. “We’re here to think,” he echoed.

“You think at the piano, not at your puzzles? And don’t—don’t fucking say the piano is a puzzle.”

“The thing about the piano actually is that it is not a puzzle,” said McCarrol, touching a pretty chord. “Music is all formulas.” 

“Don’t even try that with me. I don’t have the head for that! I like it to feel like magic washing over me.”

“I like when it unlocks itself.” McCarrol moved in a strange direction from his original chord and Johnson had to intentionally suppress the chills that naturally crept up his spine, loosening the muscles in his back. “Sometimes I just sit here and play things unlocking.”

“Until you unlock the case?”

“Just imagine the box and the key. The box—” he played the original chord again— “and the key.” Now another entirely new chord, somewhere even stranger! Johnson was going to vibrate apart from the atomic level at this point. “Or maybe this key…?”

“That’s the one,” said Johnson, teeth chattering. He shot back the rest of the whiskey, left the glass on the windowsill, and got to his feet. Pacing and talking to himself while Sun Ra blared from the record cabinet was the thing he customarily did at home when he was this close to cracking a case. He could never sit still when he was around music, it filled him up and made him fidget, since he was a little kid; that was why he rarely went with the guys to see McCarrol play the piano bars, he’d get nauseous just sitting on his hands, listening. He walked back and forth between the doorway and the window behind the piano bench, wringing his hands, trying to understand the shape of each box and key.

“Matt on the CN Tower,” he said to McCarrol when he felt the cue in the music. “That’s a box.”

“Lightning’s the key,” McCarrol said. He played a few striking, fluttery high chords with the right hand. “What he thought he was doing was getting a shock of electricity into the streetcar power, into the RV. And he was willing to sacrifice himself to do it.”

“Why?”

“If you saw a bullet flying at me, and I didn’t see it, would you risk getting hit to push me out of the way?”

“Is this some kind of trolley problem? I don’t know that I could see a bullet, Mac. This isn’t the fucking Matrix.”

“You know what I mean.”

“You’re asking if I would I take a bullet for you.”

“I think I would probably do it for you,” McCarrol said like it was no big deal. The middle finger on his left hand put up a tender thrum against one of the low black keys. “I guess I hope I’m never tested. But when I imagine it…”

Johnson ripped off the band-aid. “I would do it.”

“Yeah. I feel like even if you’d said you wouldn’t, I know you actually would.”

Johnson didn’t know what to do with that. “I think we should wait a minute,” he said. “I don’t know if we should go all the way to noble self-sacrifice. This could be some kind of perverse crucifixion before the wrongdoer situation. The ex-husband who kills himself in front of the wife who filed for divorce. Look what you made me do.”

“I’d entertain it,” said McCarrol, “if Jay wasn’t driving the RV. That’s the lynchpin, JJ, that’s the puzzle box. Whatever this was, was an intentional and collaborative and well-choreographed effort between two people who’ve wanted nothing to do with each other for twenty years. We need the key to that box.”

The melody on the piano was taking songish form. Johnson’s brain generated a nonsense phrase: Piles of movements between locked puzzles.

“The RV itself is still a puzzle, remember. What the hell was going on in there? It was like a mobile shrine to what might have happened if Matt didn’t kick Jay out of the band. It’s a fantasy, sort of like a dream space, like a—yeah, like that, dreamier…” It sounded kind of Twin Peaks-y, over there on the piano, the show that had made Johnson think as a child that maybe a strange and overimaginative boy could be a cop. “Like a, in the alternate universe where we did it all different it’s like this.”

“2013 or so,” McCarrol said. “That guy who kidnapped and murdered that woman who resembled his high school girlfriend—”

“—in the storage unit that looked like his teenage bedroom. Yes. I do remember that one.”

“You cracked that case.”

“You got him to break in interrogation! I got chills.”

Johnson had tried. Failed. Dude was looking smug. They argued in the hallway. McCarrol went back in with a cup of hot chocolate for the guy. Said, I know he can be tough. Johnson watched helplessly from beyond the one-way mirror as McCarrol leaned in closer. Sympathetic eyes, head tilted like a dog. Wheedled it out of him easy as anything. Magic.

“Is there a similarity we should probe here?” McCarrol asked.

“Okay,” said Johnson, shaking his head to clear the memory, “let’s try it.” McCarrol circled intentionally back to the locked puzzle theme, keeping the low hand soft. “Jay and Matt must have reconciled in secret at some point. And Jay killed his guitarist because he was standing in the way of… getting the band back together. God, this feels so stupid.”

“No, keep going.”

“Let’s take your theory of Jay’s personality. That this was an escape attempt.”

“Escape attempt into the past.”

“But there is no going back.”

“That doesn’t stop anyone from trying.”

Johnson realized he was staring out the window at the light rail trains on the track beyond the backyard fence. Blinked to clear the weird film from his eyes. Down in the overgrown garden the tabby cat was tormenting a large bug. “You’re saying the RV was supposed to be a time machine.”

McCarrol laughed. “I didn’t say that. You did!”

“You’re so clearly saying exactly that on the piano!”

“Am I?”

“Yes!”

McCarrol had turned his face away. A few gray hairs tracing the nape of his neck where there was a weird smudgy freckle. Johnson’s hands felt painfully full of energy, blood-hot, swollen, like if he touched something sharp he might burst.

“Detective Sergeant Jason McCarrol,” said Johnson, trying to keep his voice low and even. “You were the first person ever to take me seriously. Oh, god. Is that Simon and Garfunkel?”

“Detective Sergeant Jon Johnson,” said McCarrol, grinning. “Yes, it’s ‘Old Friends.’”

Johnson was in awe. “You can really be so evil, you know that? This is why you’re the box guy. This is how you get those awful confessions out of people.”

“If you take somebody else’s feelings seriously…” McCarrol shrugged. Just the delicate movement of his hands on the keys was painful to behold. “Sometimes you end up winning. I could tell you were a special case. Everybody thought they were on Law and Order, but you wanted to be Special Agent Dale Cooper.”

“I always forget you have this girly sentimental side to you. Do you really think we’re gonna be sitting on a bench in the park together at age seventy?”

“When things are really awful,” said McCarrol carefully, “when not even the puzzles or the piano will help, I think of when we were young, when we thought we were invincible, when we didn’t know—or I think of us when we’re old, walking in the park. The version of us that survives.”

Johnson thought about the red blanket on the white bed in the other room. He felt wrung by an invisible hand. “I imagine it’s all a movie,” he said. “None of it’s real. We’re actors. I think we escape by time traveling too, Mac.”

“Okay, so imagine it’s real.”

“Help me? I liked the—the melody where your hands were switching—that one. Man, I don’t know how you do this.”

“Years of playing every day.”

“Not that, the… I feel like the music is puppeteering my brain. In the movie version of reality, where time travel is real, they worked together to send Jay back. To fix… to fix—?”

“The murder?”

“Maybe. Too easy.” He could hear where the song was going, unfolding like magic; all he had to do was go, running breathlessly, lungs searing, where the melody was leading him. “He went back to fix the original wound. To keep the band together. To get the twenty years with his friend back.”

McCarrol shifted his hands toward the center of the piano, the way he probably swept up puzzle pieces, and closed the melody on a sort of bridging, ambivalent chord. He waited for the strings inside to stop ringing before closing the fall board. He bowed his head with a tired grace as though he had just completed a classical concerto with a symphony orchestra.

Johnson was overwhelmed with a sudden urge to hold the nape of McCarrol’s neck again. He felt like crawling under the piano bench and falling asleep like a dog. “I need a drink,” he said.

---

---

---

4.

The first time he did this with another man, it was some guy who came up after an open mic. As he grew up Jay recognized the type. It was the kind of guy he himself would grow into. He was older, neat, good looking, clearly had money but wasn’t splashy about it. He bought Jay a few drinks and flattered him a little but not too much. They left together and the guy felt him up in the cab.

He didn’t particularly want to go back to his mom’s place. Later he would tell the press there was a time when he was technically homeless, which wasn’t true. It was just a choice between friends’ couches and hookups’ beds and being ground under his mother’s heel. Later he would discover the pleasure that could be found in being ground under a heel, but that would take a while.

Dude lived in a nice condo with a view. With the lights off in the bedroom the deep black void of the lake carved a vertiginous edge against the city light. So stark. Like a yin yang sign or something. Jay gazed into it and let his eyes unfocus. Dude’s hand ran gently down his spine. His face was just perceptible in the corner of Jay’s eye, so he turned his own face into the pillow. “That’s alright, pretty,” said the guy. He was trying to sound nonchalant but Jay could hear in his voice the charge of elation to be the first. Well maybe he was technically, literally, but somebody else was in there deeper, in the blood, in the fragments of cells. Jay wanted it to be anything other, but this was a pale imitation. The guy’s hand was on the back of Jay’s neck now, holding him like a bad dog. “Don’t be ashamed. It feels good, right?”

It did; he could feel the burning eyes on him, and that was going to have to be enough for now. Later he would be confident enough to tell them not to speak.

--

The wind had picked up on the lake. Little waves breaking on the rocks, against the dock. The loons had hidden. The clouds thickened. This kind of weather in films heralded the consequential. In the music business heralded people running around backstage saying can’t possibly go out there. Gonna electrocute ourselves. I don’t give a shit. Send them all home. Two weeks ago had heralded the arrival back in this new and changed world which was now even newer and changinger. The flannel sheets were staticky and smelled like the red knit blanket they’d had on the back of the couch in the Queen Street place.

“Freaking kind of me out this is bird,” said Matt. His hands still weren’t dextrous enough for buttons and besides they were trembling. Jay’s were too. He was trying hard not to rip Matt’s shirt off. “Know you do how,” Matt said. “Years how many. We were since kids. Dream first my think I wet about you was. Sound like I fucking idiot. Planned big whole overture I had…”

“Keep talking.”

“Embarrassing’s,” said Matt.

“No, I like it.”

Jay pushed the shirt off over his shoulders. He wrapped a hand over the distorted print of his own face. Matt tasted good, like fire. His sweat tasted remarkably like it smelled.

“Been fucked probably you every way which. Right?”

Some big ravenous hunger of being starved for years surfaced leviathanish in Jay’s soul. “Yeah,” he said.

“Me for waiting.”

Oh the big dark eyes. An unplayable song. “Yeah,” said Jay again.

Neither of them knew what to do with that. It sort of hovered in the room. Jay stepped back to pull his own shirt over his head and throw it somewhere.

“We’re dead,” Matt said again. Jay just looked at him, savoring the last few seconds of delicious mystery beyond the straining crotch of the camo sweatpants from the Winnipeg Walmart. “Dreaming,” said Matt.

Jay sat down across his lap, felt the muscles tense, the heat, the coiled energy— “Just look at me,” he said. He changed the key slightly. “Look just at me.” But then he himself could hardly bear it. It was more intimate and strange than the feeling of Matt’s dick against his own.

How was it possible this had never happened before. It was so easy! It was almost ridiculous that he had ever tried to approximate this with randos in a basement. Maybe those people were more adept at the literal mechanics of fucking, but how could that have ever been the point? They reveled in the contrasting shapes and shades of their bodies. They stumbled and fumbled through much ticklishness and laughing and dissembled each other with awe. They chased each other down the stairs into warm oblivion. They fell asleep and woke up and remembered and started again.

For a moment in the middle of the night Jay thought he woke up in another body very like this one, thinking, fucking hell. I’m too old for this. Where—fuck—wait—not here. They’ll know— and where is he? God, we were so close. Then he for real with pounding mourning heart upwoke and the nape of Matt’s neck was there which his fingers and lips he let brush over and the moon-white light outside was on the lake and from away far calling were the loons.

---

---

---

“Do you remember when I got shot?”

McCarrol sighed, turning the car onto King Street. In the darkness the thin soft-looking shadows under his eyes were creased and purply as bruises. “Do I remember when you got shot.”

It hadn’t been so bad. Worse than it looked in movies, but better than everybody always said. It wasn’t even Johnson’s worst workplace injury. Slug had got him right in the meat of the arm. That was four, five years ago, and he’d thought about quitting after that in a way he never had before, thought about maybe going into PI work, hunting down cheating husbands. The adrenaline kicked in and he didn’t even lose consciousness, but McCarrol insisted on riding with him in the ambulance to the hospital.

“Do you remember those insane paramedics?” Johnson asked.

The capable and calm brunette woman, just a little younger than them, mid-thirties, way too beautiful for this gig, gently directed McCarrol to stay out of her way. She was unfazed by the blood, quick and deft with the coagulants and gauze. It was a pleasure to be tended to competently by such a beautiful and focused person with such warm and gentle hands. Meanwhile from the front seat an insane blonde woman skillfully negotiated rush hour traffic at Formula 1 speeds, shouting questions and instructions back toward them.

“Of course I remember them,” said McCarrol. “After they brought you inside, I asked the blonde for her number.”

“What!”

“Yeah. She spat in my face!”

“Still thinking about that, are you.”

“You have no idea.”

Johnson didn’t know what to do with that, so he did nothing. “Maybe a month or so after that, I had a dream about the whole thing… like how it happened, but worse.”

“How so?”

“Well, I was dying. I was lying there knowing I was dying. Remember you were trying to keep the pressure on the wound, and she told you you could hold my shoulder?”

“I remember that.” McCarrol had indeed held his shoulder with his bloody hands, further ruining Johnson’s uniform jacket.

“Well in the dream she said to you, you better hold his hand.”

“Oh man.”

“In the dream, she’s trying to save me but it’s like there’s no me to save. Like I don’t have any skin. I’m like a pile of bloody organs and a soul. And the blonde chick, your lady’s up front, yelling about zombies, driving fucking crazy, hold on fucking tight back there—like we’re swerving through some kind of post apocalyptic wasteland. Explosions, bullets shaking the cab. And I realized, they’re us, these girls are us.”

“They’re us?”

“The beautiful competent brunette and the loud tough blonde? They’re us, Mac. And the guys who shot me—remember them? Different hair colors, but they were similar, weren’t they? And the two fucking Provincial Police we had to deal with after that—don’t get me started on those two…”

“I don’t remember much about that case,” said McCarrol stiffly. “I just remember the second I knew you got hit, and you spun away, and I couldn’t tell how bad it was.”

Johnson didn’t know what to do with that either, with the hazy memory of McCarrol trying and failing to push the panic off his face, pulling off his jacket and shoving it against the shocking fountain of blood.

“It was a nightmare,” Johnson explained, “but it was also very soothing. I thought, this is just the end for this me and this you. But there’s a million other versions of us going on and on. Every pair of friends in the world, down to like, an oak tree and a maitake mushroom, is just a version of you and me, so when we die it’s just… maybe I’ll wake up in another one. That was a very comforting thought.”

The moonlit city smeared by.

“What are you saying,” said McCarrol. His voice was thick and soft.

“I’m saying exactly what I’m saying, Mac.”

“You should just be really careful, J.”

“Why?”

“If you’re not careful, you’re going to hurt me very badly.”

--

The RV was where they had left it in the parking garage. The nerdy evidence monitor was where they had left him, except asleep. He’d put his bare feet up on his desk and Johnson, grimacing, flicked his toe.

“Detectives! Sorry—sorry—uh—”

Johnson handed the kid a five out of his wallet. “Go get yourself a coffee.”

McCarrol handed him another ten. “Get us coffees too.”

“I don’t think I’m supposed to—”

Johnson casually loomed the way he would to deniably intimidate a reluctant witness or suspect. “Get!”

Kid skedaddled. Johnson and McCarrol went back to the RV, flicked their flashlights on, and climbed into the warm darkness. Without having to be prompted McCarrol sat down at the piano, resting his flashlight on top, nestled in the photographs of young Jay and Matt so it wouldn’t roll, and flipped open the fall board. “You want me to play something?”

“Can’t hurt, I guess.”

The little upright was a bit out of tune, but McCarrol played Bowie’s “Time.” He did something Johnson had never known him to do, which was sing a little under his breath. He had a lovely voice, actually, of course he fucking did. A few of the more complicated runs he had to go over a few times, and the whole thing was quite baroque without guitars, but it would do. Johnson let the music fade into the background and asked himself what he always did at a confusing crime scene. What am I looking for? What will give me proof? This of course was larger and stranger than anything he had previously had to prove, but the same theory applied.

From the piano: “We should be— fuck.” McCarrol tried the run again. Tried different places to put his voice. “—we should—should be home by now…”

Johnson thought about McCarrol’s empty apartment. He went to the front of the RV to give the dashboard a closer look than he had before. The dash itself was standard but more of those DVD-player-looking things were piled up beside it. God, if this whole thing ended up being some weird Back to the Future fetish situation gone wrong… was that what they were doing at gay sex parties these days? He leaned in closer.

A few minutes later McCarrol told him all he had done was press the sustain pedal to give the runs underpinning the final chorus a little more reverb and heft. The evidence monitor, when he returned and dropped all three coffees on the floor, would tell them that this had heretofore triggered a previously hidden generator to kick into life. But in the moment what happened seemed like magic, which was that Johnson hit the dashboard boxes with the side of his fist and the entire RV flickered to life. All around him somebody’s whole strange existence developed into being, but he was only paying attention to what was happening in front of him, which was the odometer numbers slowly forming on the boxes rigged to the dashboard. The top one gave the date of the chase set to 9:03pm, the moment of the lightning strike. The lower one gave a date in 2008.

---

---

---

5.

They every juice-spilt dawn up-got ate washed and to piano went as had they on Queen Street in distant recollected youth. Things only after all could be got back scrambled, shuffled as a card deck and here they were in their complicated shambles requiring not so much deciphering as organization into an entirely new language library, rules of grammar and syntax, a new circle of fifths, a new color wheel, a new imagination of a single present moment which contains the now and then, all only articulable in words spoken never before. By reflex alone they acted in developing the terms of an arrangement for life entirely emergent and understood the time they lived upon or within was borrowed and brief and this lent urgency and seriousness to all joy. Supplies they cached in the woods surrounding and figured at least they had the winter and pored over maps and on every surface fucked and made the record not as artwork or statement or content but as the original literal English meaning of the noun. By production of this strange and singular audio document ratifying proof forever of the befelling facts ordinary and extraordinary. That there had once existed two human persons who had broken the wheel of time. That this had them badly damaged. That from the commons they had been driven or riven. That there was no known language for what they had done, who they were, and why, so they had had to make one up. That they had lived for a while in a dream of timelessness in which there was no certainty of hour or minute or day or even year beyond the eternal present which is suspended in music. And love.

This acquaintance with time’s liquidity so intimate did excise their fear of death or capture so that when the time came after almost a year they went into the summer woods with the selfsame serious and urgent joy. On the other waking side of the dream inhabited by these bodies was only two of the same themselves alive in another waking dream.

---

---

---

“Time travel,” said the chief.

“Time travel,” said Johnson.

The silence echoed. Somebody laughed way too fucking loudly in the bullpen outside. Johnson tried badly not to let himself shift his weight nervously from foot to foot. He focused, as he often did in this exact circumstance, on the still and breathing warmth of McCarrol next to him. He looked beyond the chief, out the window, into the seam of lake and sky, the inflection or reflection point between states of incarnation which in fact was just Buffalo.

“What do you think of this,” the chief asked McCarrol, gesturing at him with a chewed toothpick.

“I admit it sounds outlandish. But there are a lot of… otherwise incomprehensible patterns.”

“Incomprehensible patterns. To two of my most experienced detectives, with a combined forty years’ experience? After not even seventy-two hours on the case? Can you see how this might strain my credulity?”

“Sir,” Johnson said, “we can go hunt down pop star and hat guy. But—”

“Didn’t even get hat guy’s name yet, huh? Johnson, you’re on thin ice here.”

Johnson tried to ignore that. Beside him McCarrol was biting his lips tightly, a habit when he was nervous, but also when he feared he might lose his temper. “—but if we got them back here,” Johnson went on, “I can guarantee both of them would have no memory of the murder itself, and no memory of what they were doing on Queen Street that night.”

The chief threw up his hands. His face was burning red, redder even than Johnson’s probably was. “Then let them plead insanity before the Crown. Which, honestly, the two of you should get yourselves prepared for too.”

“Sir—”

“I don’t want to hear another peep out of you. I’m giving this to Raab and Tarantini.”

Those fucking two? “Sir, with all due respect—”

“What did I just say! Shut up, Johnson, you’re digging yourself a hole.”

“Give us another go,” said McCarrol evenly. He was using the voice he used on crime victims or on Johnson when things were going wrong. “We’ll bring them in. Let the lawyers hash out their innocence, like you said.”

“You’ve already wasted so much time with this… not even frivolity! Insanity. Pure insanity. Both of you, out of my office, now. Take half an hour, debrief Raab and Tarantini. Then I want you out of this building. Go home and get some fucking sleep. Maybe don’t look at each other for a while.”

“What about our other—”

“Cases? You have no other cases. As of now you’re both on medical leave.”

“What!”

“You can’t just spring this on us.”

“I can and will. That’s an order.”

“For how long?”

“Until I can successfully forget that you came into my office seriously trying to tell me you let a perp and an accomplice off into the wind for seventy-two hours so you could investigate a time travel theory that would exonerate them. Can you not see how this is insane behavior? This is the behavior of people in active psychiatric crisis. When was the last really ugly case you had?”

Johnson couldn’t resist. “Go ahead and sign the disability checks. We’ll take them!”

“Get out!”

In the bullpen everybody pretended they hadn’t been listening. Raab and Tarantini were already gathering paperwork from Johnson and McCarrol’s desks. Johnson gave them the finger. McCarrol hit the button for the elevator but Johnson couldn’t be in this building one more fucking second. He went for the stairs and McCarrol followed.

Hot outside, rising off the asphalt in the parking lot, the sun an eviscerating, scouring pale eye. In the frank shadowlessness of its overhead gaze all things felt slightly loose, detached, unreal. They got in McCarrol’s car together without speaking. No particular destination was on Johnson’s mind. He thought of several jokes he knew would fall flat. How about that BLT at the Rivoli right now?

“I’ll tell him it was all my idea,” Johnson said as they pulled out of the parking lot onto the street. His voice cracked, like he hadn’t used it in a while. “It had nothing to do with you. You were just trying to, to help me because you know I. I’m losing it.”

“J,” said McCarrol. “No. I’m not doing that. It was my idea too. And you’re not losing it. We’ve had crazy ideas before that nobody believed, and we were right almost every time.”

“Almost is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, man.”

“Let’s go home and have a drink and a think. Okay? Yours? We can put on Don Cherry.”

Johnson sniffed. “You hate Don Cherry.”

McCarrol shrugged. “It’ll make you happy.”

Now that felt like a physical blow. Felt like being shot all over again! They were skirting some very deep hole. The stars were falling. The world was already ending. Why not? Johnson reached across the shifter and pried McCarrol’s right hand off the steering wheel and held it like a small wounded animal in both of his.

There was a long moment of hurting quietude before McCarrol said, “You always do this.”

“Do what?”

“When everything is lost, you do this!”

“Mac, what are you talking about? I’ve never held your hand before.”

Tears were streaming soundlessly down McCarrol’s face. He didn’t, couldn’t speak.

“I would remember— ha. It’s been years thinking… I would remember if I held your hand before.”

They were both squeezing so tightly that Johnson could feel his fingers tingling. He studied the side of his partner’s face. Watched the crow’s feet twitch in the corner of his eye. Something in the corner of his own eye caught his attention and he looked out the back window in time to see the gray Honda turn onto the block. Then he watched it followed them through one more turn.

“Mac?”

“J?”

“Do you remember how to lose a tail?”

McCarrol squeezed tightly once more before taking his hand back. Glanced up into the rearview mirror. His pretty eyes were brimming with liquid but his face had gotten serious again. “I think I do,” he said. “Little Honda?”

“Yeah. Give me your phone?”

McCarrol did. The black box was warm from having been in his pocket. “Gonna try to lose him on the Gardiner,” he said. “Then cut north on 427. The bridge—”

“Yeah. I got it.”

McCarrol’s phone background was a fairly recent photo of Johnson working across the desk, head bowed, glasses, white button-up with the sleeves cuffed halfway up his forearm, reading over a handoff report from the RCMP. He wasn’t sure how he’d never noticed before. He felt in his entire body a revving, charging, kicking-up feeling that was not just the engine turning over quickly as McCarrol stepped on the gas. They merged onto the expressway. Johnson put the window down and McCarrol got in the right lane and on the bridge over the Humber Johnson threw their phones like frisbees into the water. Sat back down brushing off his hands, even though Reid’s voice in the kitchen of the Bridle Path mansion yesterday was turning over in his mind: AirTags in every one of them…

“You see him back there?”

Johnson turned. “Hundred meters back, maybe.”

“Okay, hold tight.”

McCarrol put the gas pedal against the floor and deftly weaved ahead through traffic. With nothing else to do but try to keep from puking Johnson reached for the volume dial and turned up the strains of “Fly By Night” by Rush on the radio.

“Gotta be kidding me,” said McCarrol.

“Ha. Maybe a little heavy handed.”

“Not what I would put in the movie, but whatever.”

“What would you put in the movie?”

“‘Never Come Down’,” said McCarrol. “Of course.”

Johnson managed to stop laughing only because McCarrol took the ramp onto 427 at inadvisable speeds and he was obliged to cling to what his mother had called the “Jesus handle” for dear life.

“Do you still see him?”

Traffic had gotten pretty thick behind them, coming off the Gardiner and heading toward the airport. The afternoon light off the lake was sick and shifty. It took Johnson a few moments to spot the gray Honda. “Eight cars back,” he said.

“What song would you put in the movie?” McCarrol asked.

“Does it have to be Canadian?”

“Duh.”

“Alanis. ‘Ironic.’”

McCarrol laughed the painful too-loud and shaky laugh of the urologist’s office. “Nice.”

“Everybody gives her shit for improperly defining irony in that song. I’m not concerned with that. I like the little vignettes. Really indelible images, you know. Ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife. This is sort of one of those moments, one of those images. Two people realize—realize something only when—but can I hold your hand again, or do you need both?”

McCarrol indicated the upper right quadrant of the wheel, 2:00 on the clock. “Grab right here. Left hand. Underhand.” Then sandwiched his right hand on top. The smooth pleather wheel was between their sweaty palms but McCarrol’s thumb brushed gently over his, once and then again. A shocking, out-of-body type of thought immersed Johnson in the cool liquid of itself: He really loves me. What the hell?

“What now,” McCarrol said. He glanced up into the rearview. He too must have seen that the gray Honda was not far off, keeping its careful distance. That it had federal military plates. That there were four burly guys inside. He probably knew as well as Johnson did that there had to be a drone overhead if all this was happening. They were probably being watched like OJ Simpson’s televised slow ride in the video forensic offices back at the Toronto PD even now. Curt and Bobby had probably made popcorn to enjoy alongside everybody else they had ever pissed off.

Johnson’s heart was pounding. He said, “You tell me.”

“I need to touch you just one time before we die,” McCarrol said. The silent tears were tracking down his face again. “I want to make love with you and hold you in my bed. And I want to play the piano about you for you. Can we do that?”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Let’s go. Take me home.”

“Home.”

“Yeah. And you know the big Value Village on Weston?”

“What about it?”

“Stop there. We need to get some art for the walls. I can’t be in there another minute with those bare walls.”

“J, you know what kind of stuff they have there—college dorm type of art! AI-generated penguins in bathtubs.”

“We’re gonna buy Value Village out of AI-generated penguins in bathtubs. We’re gonna get a lamp that looks like a duck, we’re gonna get some musty old books, and we’ve got to get curtains, it’s crazy that you don’t have fucking curtains. We’re going to go back to your house and get everything set up nice. And then you can do whatever you want to me. I’ll be your paraphilic fetish object til the RCMP break the door down.”

“Hit the blinker for me,” said McCarrol. “Left.” Johnson did. “We’ll take Eglinton across. Be there in twenty minutes.”

They merged off the freeway and onto the crosstown thoroughfare. Johnson sat back in the seat and closed his eyes. He felt McCarrol’s heartbeat in their hands, heard him breathing. Felt the sun on his face. He loved the city at the end of the summer like this. He didn’t care if the gray Honda was still following them; audiences were so uncomfortable with ambiguous endings these days, even though ambiguity was a basic fact of human life. And anyway, this wasn’t a movie after all, it was only a long and beautiful dream. And at the end of it, they would wake up in other versions of themselves.

---

---

---

6.

r/truecrime | 8 hours ago
u/greenghostie

Is This the Long-Rumored Jay McCarrol Fugitive Album?

not sure if any true crime fans on here follow this story — maybe only exciting if you’re canadian! jay mccarrol is the pop star who murdered his guitar player in 2025 and is still at large, some say presumed dead after some personal effects were found in remote manitoba last year. some years ago the police announced they’d found a fishing camp where they think he was hiding out for a few months just after the murder. some fans speculated some recorded music was uncovered in this investigation. last week this video, “nirvana (the band) — birdcalls,” hit youtube… the piano certainly sounds like him! what do you think?

1903 upvotes | 200 comments

u/passarine208
as a longtime fan pre-murder i was skeptical but yeah it’s definitely him. the minor 2nd dissonant notes about 40 minutes in are a dead giveaway nobody else plays like that lol. is this lowkey his best album?

u/emict
just sit and ponder for a second about how many impossible things would have to suddenly be possible for this to actually be an LP recorded on the run by the guy who only ever wrote one good song

u/bignaturals8008
@emict are you saying this can’t be mccarrol because it’s good lol

u/livland
listening now, honestly love it! whether it’s mccarrol or an elaborate hoax, it’s just good music. who is drumming on this LP? definitely bringing some outsider art energy!

u/andanterose
guys FUCK this obvious hoax why is nobody talking about what happened to the original detectives assigned to the case????? toronto police homicide detectives johnson and mccarrol (no relation) were assigned to the case the day after jay’s disappearance and three days later they were both put on emergency medical leave and nobody’s heard from them since. they were both twenty-year detective sergeants with hundreds of solved murders under their belts and now they’re rumored to be locked up on a psych ward. the “””LEAK”””” of this album is an obvious distraction from some kind of even more nefarious cover-up

u/opachuanau
@andanterose whoa i hadn’t heard about that. there’s definitely something fishy about this case. it’s just completely improbable that the RCMP never caught the guy. i bet these detectives had an inconvenient lead, and were silenced

u/ichthus-hop
also a pre-murder fan here and honestly it’s the lyrics that sold me, though the vox don’t sound like any of jay’s previous collaborators. the way the piano is responding to the vocals / lyrics is sensitive and sympathetic in a way that is pure jay. the melodies also sound scrambled, like the words—the right notes moving in the wrong flow. he’s playing like his early demos :)

---

--

-