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turned into a fiery lump just under his rib cage—where he always imagined his heart was. He wanted this meeting over with—the last recruit on their dream list: Simon Hayward, the best of the bunch, the most potential, supposedly—if they could track him down. He’d always imagined the food would be up to standard at a place like this—an established downtown racquet club that had been around for almost a hundred years, the pretentious plaque on the lobby wall had said. This woman across from him was pleasant enough, as pleasant as any mother could be in a conversation about a son whose life could not be distilled into a synopsis worthy of her expectations. Thornquist got the feeling she would trade her son in if she could, for one of the young men he could see now, on the tennis court beyond the pool. Glossy nonentities, whose lives would follow the indisputably satisfactory trajectory of a well-returned serve—the kind of man who mistakes nostalgia for poetry.
    This woman in her tennis whites looked ten years younger than she must be—fit, slim. The sun had done its damage, though; the skin around the eyes, the backs of her hands—like the rings of a tree. She reached down to the purse beside her chair and took out a small, well-used address book. The page she turned to was a spider’s nest of scrawls and amendments. She took the dainty pen Thornquist had slipped from the leather spine of his own notepad and wrote down the number on the fresh page he presented her with. She looked up quickly and gave him the kind of smile he expected fromsomeone in physical pain. “I hope this works out for him; he needs a job. A real job. Something. ”
    Simon Hayward closed the umbrella and let the rain pummel his face. Wet. Wetter than he’d ever been. This city like an eternal clammy car wash. Underwater wet was something else—the opposite somehow; unwettable. A spot on the top of his head was suddenly stenciled with cold rain: an arc of sensation amid the dense bristles of his crew cut. Follicle-free scar tissue.
    He crossed the street through the eternal traffic. Like the endless rain, an essential part of Vancouver in his mind now; traffic fighting for any of the space left between the mountains and the ocean—this city going down in his mind as a place for cars, full of hopelessly disturbed drivers who never looked up at the Brownian lilt of the city’s craggy horizon.
    â€œI will never own a car,” he said out loud as he threaded his way umbrella-first through the gridlocked traffic at the intersection —Robson Street on a Saturday night. “I will walk my feet off first.” Simon parried an Acura trying to break through a gap in the trickle of pedestrians crossing the road. He thrust at the headlight of a BMW. In the cone of floodlit rain his half-furled umbrella looked like flapping bat wings—black, glistening. “Fuck you,” he said under his breath. Water trickled down his face; he could feel the dampness crawl through his clothes—his Bill Blass overcoat hung like something dead and bleeding on his shoulders.
    Someone is dialing my number, he thought to himself. Mom. His mother doing her weekly duty. His dutiful return call would ensure that the check was in the mail. “Yes, the same address. No, this place is working out fine . . . No, Janis is still here with the dog; her friend Jeff is off somewhere planting trees. Yes, Mom, they do need more trees up here in British Columbia. Yes, it is kind of ironic, you’re right. Bye, Mom. Talk to you next week.”
    He worked his way through the umbrellas and clusters of pedestrians—his feet were officially wet now, his new Rockport shoes, “World Tours” or whatever they were called, leaking at the seams—till he found it, the “Caftan,” a coffee shop that wasn’t a Starbucks. A place that had tanning machines in the back, for some reason—caffeine