Standing by my motorcycle, I forced myself through a meticulous safety check routine
because I had a habit of sharing traffic lanes when I was vexed, and the bridge didn't have a ditch
of forgiveness. Well it did, but I didn’t have a parachute attached to a dingy.
I was still incredulous over the extent of her hoax as I leaned into the onramp, a feeling that
dissipated with the rub of the curb and Newton's Third Law kept me heading toward my fate.
Refocused, I made my way to Davie Street like a probationary driver on weed, then I inched
toward home through Saturday shopping traffic. Feeling supremely stupid for going back to see
her actually served to calm me while two-foot advances grinding away my clutch connected me
to a sense of loss. I hadn’t moved two blocks before I was debating with myself again, because it
wasn’t as if I made up my experiences with clarity or intrusive thoughts.
My tentative thinking was that I could embrace Bonnie's performance as part of her
research, which wasn’t farfetched within her meticulous preparations, or I could accept that there
was something seriously wrong with her wiring. Maybe both. A fourth option came to mind as I
pulled over at the Dover Pub; she was researching how a well travelled, reasonably intelligent
man when subjected to endless conditioning by untouchable tits and ass can be turned into an
idiot.
I went inside to soak up courage enough to decide which one of us was an asshole, and
which one was crazy, not that one necessarily excluded the other.
Everything Australian was in vogue for some reason, except Men At Work in concert, so a
number of Fosters fat cans later, I over enunciated “fuck it” into the smoky air and scraping my
chair on the plank floor stood up to dig out my cash. Two tables over, a stranger grunted in
agreement while his muddled buddy had turned to look for the bar’s resident drunk, Delores.
“Women troubles?” Miriam said, sidling up from wherever servers lurk to scare the shit out
of contemplating customers.
“Investment problem,” I said, offering her an uncounted wad of cash.
First taking the correct amount of bills, she pried open my fingers to snatch away my keys
and said, “I saw you leave yesterday. I wouldn’t want to lose a good tipper. Any tipper,” she
corrected herself, looking at the sparsely inhabited room of afternoon, indigent regulars. Who
was she?” she asked, as I moved to step around her.
“Who are they,” I corrected her, offering her a five dollar bill.
“Have it, already,” she said, refusing the money and I walked outside as free as a man can
be in the world I knew.
Chapter 27
To leave the memory of Bonnie behind, I also left the grant application alone and instead
concentrated on filling out the civilian ambiance in chapters of my book that preceded events in
Lebanon. Background colour aside, my thinking was that readers who were familiar with my
characters’ environment and upbringing would better understand why they made some of the
otherwise incomprehensible choices they made, when the war came to their doorstep.
The drafts of various family scenarios took a tedious nine days to complete because writing
about their social conformation inexorably led to thoughts of Bonnie and her premises, which I
dismissed as best I could until they struck an inner chord: I wondered if Bonnie’s eccentricities
were a manifestation of an unusually agile mind, kind of like Robbie LeBlanc’s but intelligible?
