“She’s friendly,” the man says, but Albertson decides to stay where he is, twenty feet away.
“I was wondering if I could ask you a question,” he says to the old man.
The man pets the dog as it walks in circles, sniffing, completing its picture of the world. “Shoot.”
“Were you walking your dog this morning?”
The man’s face freezes. It’s subtle, but Albertson notices. “Do I know you?”
“I’m wondering if you saw anything odd this morning.”
“What kind of odd?”
“Out of the ordinary,” Albertson says. He is sinking into code speak.
The man’s face hardens. “What are you going on about?”
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Albertson says, turning to leave. He has to look at his shoes again, in the freezer. He needs to confirm the events. Because now he’s not sure. Again.
“Sorry I couldn’t help you,” the man calls out.
Albertson turns back around. “Something odd is happening,” he says.
The man takes a step toward Albertson and then stops. “Perhaps you need some sleep,” he offers gently.
“Horses,” Albertson whispers.
“Horses?”
“Wild horses. A herd of them. Galloping down the street. Early this morning.” Albertson feels out of breath now.
“Something like that would have showed up on the news, no?” the old man says, and this triggers in Albertson a kind of low-level panic. He feels his ears get warm, tingling.
“Y-yes,” he stammers. “You’d think.” Albertson turns and walks away, slowly, back to his apartment. He knows what he saw, but he needs to look at his shoe again.
Back at home, Albertson opens the freezer. There is his brown Oxford encrusted with horse shit. He opens a beer, sits down on the couch, and turns on the TV. He searches for news of what he saw, for some form of evidence, but finds none. He opens his laptop, scours the Internet, but nothing shows up — his search takes him everywhere but to the place he wants to go. Nothing. Less than that. Disappointment. A feeling that he is not himself, that what he knows is wrong, that everything he thinks about himself, everything he dreams, is all wrong.
A dream would not have covered his shoe in horse shit. That stuff is real. Everything else isn’t.
Across the street from the shoe store is a lingerie boutique owned by a middle-aged Indian woman. She comes in for shoes every few weeks, and Albertson attends to her personally. Mrs. Sen has large feet and stands a head above Albertson. She often makes a point of noting how rare it is for an Indian woman to be her height. Albertson always feigns surprise, and Mrs. Sen buys her giant shoes — she’s been partial to Mary Janes lately — and returns to her boutique, but sometimes she doesn’t. Sometimes they go out for lunch and talk, and she tells Albertson about her childhood in a village north of Calcutta, and the unfortunate skateboarding accident that killed her first husband, and how her new husband is a judge who has bad breath and always interrupts her, and how she doesn’t know what to do with him, but won’t leave him because they’re invited to all the good parties, and she quite enjoys her new social life.
Today, Mrs. Sen enters the store and takes a seat on the divan. Albertson puts down his coffee and walks over to her.
“Mrs. Sen,” he says, smiling.
“We’re having a dinner party, you know.”
“And what will you be wearing?”
“No, no, I’m not here for shoes,” she says, laughing. “I’m here to invite you.”
This is an odd thing, Albertson thinks. Beyond their lunches, Mrs. Sen has never invited him into her social orbit. “When?” he asks.
A pair of shoes has caught Mrs. Sen’s attention, a pair of muted-blue open-toed pumps. “Oh my,” she says.
“I’ll have to check if we have your size.”
Mrs. Sen turns sharply to him as if he has just said something amazingly rude. “I don’t want them.”
“I can check.”
“Friday night.” She stands and takes a look at the shoes again. “Can you order them?” she asks.
“For Friday?”
“I don’t need them for Friday. It’s nothing fancy. Some dentists. A doctor. The usual lawyers and judges. A city councillor. The lady who owns the nice café in the food court. She has a young boyfriend who’s a musician.”
“I can order the shoes,” Albertson says.
“Thank you. Bring wine if you want.”
As Mrs. Sen steps into the damp light of the mall, she calls Albertson over, and he rushes to her. She leans in, motioning him to come closer.
“Did you see the horses?” she asks in a whisper. Albertson’s eyes radiate fear and awe, but also community. A communal warmth. Bathed in cold.
Albertson picks up a Beaujolais. He doesn’t know a thing about wine, can’t tell the difference between names or regions or grapes. The girl at the SAQ looks like she’s just turned eighteen, but acts like she’s been drinking wine forever. He decides not to ask her about the horses. He’s convinced that everyone around him knows something about the horses, something he isn’t allowed to know. That his understanding of this isn’t permitted. By someone. By someone important.
Mrs. Sen and her husband live downtown on Sherbrooke Street, in an ancient high-rise, built when the city was prosperous. Back then, if you said you lived on Sherbrooke Street, it meant a lot more than a street name. It meant more than money, class, or anything like that. If you said you lived on Sherbrooke Street, it meant that, because of your address, you had inexhaustible power. That if you’d told someone the world revolved around you, they would have had to consider the possibility. All because of your address.
Albertson announces himself to the elderly doorman, who gets on the phone, nods, and welcomes him in. The doorman escorts him into a tiny elevator that smells like lemon-scented wood polish.
Albertson knocks on Mrs. Sen’s door, and she answers with a look of momentary confusion — Albertson is not on her regular guest list, after all. He holds out the wine bottle awkwardly in his hands.
“The girl said it was a good year for Beaujolais.”
“What girl?”
“At the SAQ. I know nothing about wine, unfortunately.”
She accepts it and studies the label. She puts the bottle down on the side table where Albertson imagines it will sit, forgotten. “Come in.”
He takes in the apartment’s decayed grandeur, the vaguely yellowish lights and dimly lit corners populated by exotic statues, bookcases, and half-dead plants. The apartment smells like the elevator, mixed with some unidentifiable odor coming from the kitchen, a collection of spices he can’t quite make out.
“Let me introduce you to my husband.”
She takes his arm and leads him to a room with three dignified-looking men, all in gray suits, standing and talking, each holding a tumbler of Scotch.
“Am I early?” asks Albertson.
Mrs. Sen stops walking and looks at him oddly. “No. My guests are late. Annoyingly so. My husband just arrived himself. He’s in his study.”
She opens the door to the study and her husband, the judge, is standing in the middle of the room, also holding a tumbler of Scotch, watching television.
“Louis, this is the young man who sells me my shoes.”
The judge turns to face him. He studies Albertson and Albertson studies him and neither man learns much. Louis is wearing a gray suit; it seems to be a uniform.
“My wife owns a lot of shoes. You are a very lucky man.”
Mrs. Sen nudges Albertson toward her husband. Albertson allows himself to be nudged.
“Mrs. Sen has an eye for footwear,” says Albertson, uncomfortably.