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“It’s okay, puss-puss,” Matt called up to her. Then he nipped around the corner and smashed himself in the head with the two-by-four. The blow was powerful enough to stagger him, draw a bead of blood. Mariko never found the welt (what business had her hands in his hair these days?), but she did remark on the damage done to the trees.
    “Deer, probably,” Matt said to her. “This is fucking
nature
we’re living in, remember?”
    So yeah, the anger thing pissed him off. And anyway, what was anger supposed to be holding him back from? And why anger? What about fear? What about grief? What about guilt? Weren’t these things holding him back too?
    “If the movie were free,” Matt’s review had concluded, “and fifteen seconds long, I’d say yeah, go see it.” Done. Slam-dunked.
    “What?” The umgirl was turning to him, tugging at her earphones.
    Oops, was that out loud? “No, sorry, nothing.” Matt waved it away—tell ya later.
    The strange thing was that he didn’t used to believe in judgment, he used to reject it outright. As a much younger man, as a stick-drawn teen Matt spent a lot of cross-legged, lotus-pose time trying to cure himself of judgment by curing himself of judge, of ego. This was a practice inspired by Mr. Kumar—who could be spotted, on a clement day, squatting mysticlike out by the science portable—and it never worked. Matt destroyed his knees but only wounded his ego, about as effective (another of Mariko’s annoying lucidities) as wounding a problem bear. Why had he chosen to saddle himself with this spiritual know-it-all? She’d started down the path of enlightenment way later in life yet scooted way ahead. How did that work, exactly? What were Matt’s chances of turning it around now, catching up? She’d say it wasn’t about catching up, of course, more evidence of his ignorance. “You move towards what troubles you,” she’s many times explained to him. “Only by going
at
your suffering can you be freed from it.” This trip, then, mightn’t it count as a spiritual quest? All the loss he’s headed for, how can it fail to liberate him? And how can she fail to be impressed?
    Matt quick-peeked down at the girl. Her face was tilted up at the screen, a satellite dish searching for a signal. Scooped out. Scary.
    Erin. Was it Erin? Yeah, that’s who the umgirl had been reminding him of all along, his sister. That same toughness suddenly shucked off, that same drawn bow of a body. If you deepened the umgirl’s orange streaks you’d have the orangutan red of Erin’s hair. And that frill of baby fat around the elbows and knees? That survived in Erin too, until the swimming kicked in.
    Erin always gets realer as Toronto approaches, her absence more palpable, more appalling. Matt never lived in Toronto without her—he took off for the West as soon as she was gone, as soon as she’d finished wasting herself away. He must have imagined that if he left he’d stop losing her, a screwy bit of sorcery which backfired, you’d have to say, since he’s been losing her ever since. What leaving did was intensify his parents’ grief, which of course cranked up Matt’s guilt. Erin was just shy of twenty-five when she died, which made him twenty-two, half what he is today. Half his life she’s been gone, bizarre. For a long time he came home just once a year, but with the Dadinator alone now it’s twice or three times that. The added bonus of course being his Zane-times, his spirited bullshit sessions with his oldest—in a way his only—true buddy.
    Erin, like the umgirl, was into glossy magazines. She loved making fun of them, and she just plain
loved
them, which she hated. Matt fed the habit—he’d filch his mum’s
Glamours
and
Redbooks,
deliver them to Erin’s apartment downtown—hoping to foster any weakness in her, maybe save her from her strength. Matt’s most uncanny keepsake of his sister is a questionnaire—“Are You Too Purrrfect?”—torn from a
Cosmo
or some