By the time I brought them back to the coffee table, I wanted to leave. Billy One-Eye was snoring; Ryan’s head was down and he wasn’t saying anything. I suddenly felt extraordinarily tired, like if I didn’t move soon, it would be too late.
I woke with the feeling, but not the memory, that I’d heard a sound. I was high, and upon opening my eyes in the semidarkness of the candlelight, I sensed the speed with which the universe revolved around me. Had I dreamed it? What have I been dreaming?
It was an effort to keep my own head still and focus. Ryan was still in the wooden chair, slumped over, and Billy was stiff as a corpse, like he had been when we entered.
But there — shuffling steps in the kitchen, where the light was still on, and a draft came from the open window.
Open. I had closed it. Ryan had asked.
Then I heard the window slowly closing.
I struggled to clear my head, unsure what to do. But it didn’t matter. I was drugged, I felt as if I were in a cocoon or a womb. I could wriggle and kick and perhaps turn over, but I couldn’t manage to lift myself up and I struggled simply to maintain consciousness.
A figure filled the kitchen door, a big man blocking the light. He entered the studio and loomed behind Max’s statue. He was almost as big, but soon disappeared in the shadows behind. I heard him stomping around, and then approaching us. He was standing behind the couch I was on, but I couldn’t turn my head to look at him. I was lying on my side, looking across at a passed-out Billy. Ryan was only visible in my peripheral vision.
As I lay there, trying to get up and keep my eyes open, I saw him lumber out from behind the half-formed statue, almost staggering, leaning on something; it looked like a staff. Or — wait. A cane. Cane Man. He must have followed us.
I couldn’t sit up to ask Ryan or Billy. Both were snoring, as I had been. I could only watch behind my heavy lids, which opened and closed slowly, as Cane Man approached. He must have stubbed his trailing foot on the sculpture — he swore when it shifted weight and thumped the floor; the couch beneath me swayed like a canoe, and I twitched instinctively, my hand flopping and knocking an empty beer bottle off the coffee table.
I felt like the ground was gone and I was falling backward, then I got the darkness with the electric sparkles, and suddenly the world was black again.
Billy got up like a dead man. Ryan was dancing around, freaking out, like some animal caught in a trap, swearing spittle across the room in a ragged arc.
Billy was staggering over, not really conscious, just doing what Ryan was screaming at him, going over to fight with Cane Man.
He was just standing there, sizing things up. He glanced at me on the couch, then looked away quickly. He brought his attention toward Billy, who was slowly making his way toward him, hunched over and leaning on things as he walked — the arm of the couch, the coffee table, a chair beside it. Cane Man then turned to Ryan and brought his cane high above his head, swinging down on Ryan’s skull with both hands.
Ryan collapsed and screamed like a girl. Billy roared and straightened up, like a bow unstrung. He rounded his fist and delivered an underhand punch into Cane Man’s left kidney. The guy went down on top of a whimpering Ryan, who yelped upon impact. Billy lost his footing and also fell face-first onto the pile.
Beyond the statue, the light from the kitchen shone across the end of the room. Everything seemed to glow faintly, and light spilled like fog into the darkness. It seemed almost to pile up at the base of the statue, spilling around it in swirling eddies and shining from within rather than being illuminated from without.
Then my attention was caught by the Cane Man’s movements, and when I blinked, my eyes were focused on him, down the long trail of the couch with my feet so tiny in the distance, and beside me the stained and crowded wooden coffee table, the empty bottles and cans, towering over the ashtrays, matchbooks, lighters, forks, packs of cigarettes, and other debris like skyscrapers over crowded streets, and I could faintly make out his outline in the darkness behind Ryan, passed out in his chair, head bowed and leaning back into the corner with his palms together under his cheek and his knees drawn up.
Cane Man seemed to stumble on something in the darkness, maybe even bump into the chair, because I heard a tiny rumbling like thunder down a long tunnel. Ryan squeaked and leaped up off the floor, grabbing hold of the couch to anchor himself.
Cane Man came into the light, his face a red scowl. Ryan was yelling. Billy roused too, but with lids lying low and bags under his eyes. He grabbed Cane Man’s arm but fell forward at the same time.
Ryan dodged out of the way; Billy ran forward a few unsteady steps, though he recovered with his arms spread like he was about to rise from the earth. Cane Man fell forward onto the floor where Ryan had just been.
I saw Billy run out of my vision like an actor dashing into the darkness in the wings of a theater. I saw Cane Man’s big frame scrape the wide wooden planks of the floor, and then from the right side of my peripheral vision, I saw Billy jump back on top of Cane Man, stomping his head and his face, hopping around on one foot.
A sound like a carbonated waterfall roared in my ears, and the statue, still radiant and diffuse against the darkness, sailed across my vision from the left and dropped upon Cane Man like a lover upon his betrothed, and there was an echoing boom as the great phallus found its mark, the torso smothering the now prone Cane Man, the shoulder popping his skull like a blueberry between your fingers just as Billy, without turning about or flinching a muscle, suddenly bounded backward away from the spread of brains, blood, and eyes trailing connective tissue and nerves like spermatozoa or comets.
Suddenly there was silence, which either lasted less than a second or an interminably long time, or both. Ryan approached from the left and Billy approached from the right and all I could see beyond my distant and tiny feet was a granite boulder rising to a point like a triangle and then the two of them slowly, and as if on purpose in synchronization, turned their faces toward mine.
They staggered and climbed over whatever was in their way and it took the two of them to lift me from the couch and drag me, one on either side, to the window. Billy took a handful of snow from the sill and smashed it all over my face, and then Ryan slapped me until I roused enough to help them get me over the sill, out the window, and onto the fire escape.
We slowly climbed our way down, acutely aware of how high we were, of what had just taken place, and of the need to get away as quickly as possible. We fell and tripped and scraped our way down the iron staircase, making too much noise. But this was Saint-Laurent, where strange noises were normal every night. We didn’t arouse any suspicion.
Like drunken revelers we climbed up Saint-Urbain’s hill toward Mount Royal, where Ryan and Billy pulled and pushed me up the stairs to my second-floor flat. When we got inside, my girlfriend woke and gave us a stony welcome. She took me from them, angry I’d brought them home — though in truth it was the other way around — and led me to bed. After I stripped out of my clothes and climbed under the sheets, I began to cry uncontrollably, like a child, great sobs blinding me. My girlfriend turned away from me, and left me to cry myself out.
When Max opened the studio door the next day, there was his glorious statue, his ecce homo, pinning the broken rummy to the floor, his phallus up the bum, so to speak. He called the cops, but they never made any arrests. The Gazette reported that a homeless man was tragically killed seeking shelter in the massive blizzard, and the city spent the next week clearing snow and ice from the streets.