By Kevin Potvin

Up is down and evening is morning for that invisible class of workers who silently populate the graveyard shifts. More varied in their tasks and more alone in doing them than those chirpy day-timers who populate offices and flip through date-books filled with meetings, those who toil under cover of darkness are united only in their shared and unspoken secret that they alone do the truly essential work. Nobody hires a person to work overnight who isn’t absolutely necessary.

John, his hair standing straight up as though in homage to Don King, his eyes like the bottom of two water wells—an unsettling effect amplified by his round glasses (as though in homage to John Lennon)—was himself at work in the dark evening. Well, he was taking a break from work to sit at the church door table where all that noodle slurping had so suddenly stopped. His taxi-cab was parked out front where it’s computer whirred and beeped quietly to itself, dutifully maintaining its vigil over the comings and goings of other cabs delivering other fares to destinations all around the enshrouded surface of the city. He booked off just long enough to get some food down his gullet, but to also make that big announcement.

For it wasn’t at the table when he realized the startling fact that it was the 24th anniversary of the 25-year absolutely binding pact with his housemates Matthew and Luke. It struck him earlier in the evening, but he kept it in his back pocket till the right moment, mid-meal he figured, the typical moment where what passed as casual conversation between the three men in that crazy crooked house usually dried up.

The scene went something like this: The front door slammed shut shuddering the house on its foundation. John barked out “I’m boiling up noodles, you want some?” as he passed the living room, clumping hard down the hallway. He didn’t check to see because he knew Luke was somewhere in there amidst the canyons of papers and books, researching his novel (a term that had come to cover every activity in life that was not actually writing).

He was there, of course, his usual sad gaunt face awash in the blue glow of the screen of his computer on which squibs erupt out the side of World Trade Centre building number seven in a loop of video he had been studying for months. Today he was clicking a stopwatch to capture the time elapsed between each burst of dust, that data forming part of yet another exciting new theory. On a sheet of paper beside his elbow were series of numbers filled out to the margins, and in his mouth, clenched between his teeth, was a yellow pencil. “Yeh,” he clumsily called back to John, a bit of slobber dripping out his mouth, over the pencil, and stringing down to his keypad. The pencil part carried over from his job at the bookstore where he underlined revealing quotes in the newspapers at the start of his shifts in the early unbusy mornings—but then, unable to afford to have the price of the papers deducted from his pay envelope, he folded them up and put them back on the shelf for sale. There were never that many complaints. And why should there be? He was free-of-charge directing readers to the all-important hidden clues, the remainder of the papers being filled with “tripe” for the “sheeple.”

He needn’t have tried to say anything through the pencil in his mouth. Any grunt, thump, or foot stamping would have sufficed to get the affirmative message to John, by now in the kitchen and already eagerly pulling multiple noodle cups from a bag on the floor. They were as near to telepathically connected as humans can get, having been in each other’s faces more even than an out-of-work couple living in a basement during the rainiest winter on record.

Matthew, upstairs at his table in the riser looking out over the cedars (no, it wasn’t Mrs Bates, or even Norman Bates, but there is a definite resemblance), could be counted on to come sliding down the stairs at the first hint of food like a cat at the first tap of a can opener against a tin of tuna, no matter how far away in the house it was curled up in. He was reading. Well, a book was open in front of his face anyway. He had a contraption (“a technology” he called it, as though always bent on annoying his two house-husbands with slightly obscure uses of words, like “house-husbands” as well) that was made of wire which slung around his neck and held a book open on his chest, for ease of reading. But all it ever did for cherub-faced and deceptively good-natured Matthew was to encourage sleep. You’d think all the sleep he got at the security guard shack south of the city, on Annacis Island, would have been sufficient, but no. The book? You’ll be surprised at that too: “Eve: Sex, Childbirth and Motherhood Through the Ages.” Research, research, research! He awoke at the sound of the cup of noodles being “de-lidded.”

“What’s for breakfast?” he came in cheerfully smirking, bearing a gift of mockery, for effect. It had probably been years since they ever made eye contact with each other, so the effect was wasted on him alone. “Did you know,” he said, stretching his leg over a chair to straddle it backwards and then lurch it in thumps up to the edge of the table, “they used crocodile dung in Egypt for contraception, but as a morning-after pill, after you had sex,” he said looking challengingly at John’s eyes. These were dropped down to his work dexterously manipulating the lids on the cups of noodles, but fully aware Matthew’s eyes were on his. He didn’t reply. “You’d smear it over your pussy, and into it as well. But it had to be fresh.” Nothing, no reaction. Huh?

What Matthew knew was that John had grown pious over the years, as though he had fallen into the sphere of his namesake from Bible lore, a book his own novel research had taken him deep into. He could not be easily teased, but, betraying no sign of growing distress, he could be brought to the point of sudden detonation if the right buttons were pushed in the right order. It was sport for Matthew. Lately, it was anything that touched on Christianity, sex, or bodily fluids and solid waste, Matthew worked out, by trial and error. Egyptian shit contraceptives, he was delighted to note to himself, before falling asleep in his chair in the riser with a smile on his face, magically banged all three gongs. Surely, he thought, John could be made to lose it.

But John did not. He was, surprisingly to Matthew, unfazed, even at the mention of crocodile shit being ground into Cleopatra’s freshly-ploughed furrow. Even Luke looked up, meeting Matthew’s eyes with even more of his usual vacant and uncomprehending look. It could, they considered, be one of those moments John was noted for between the bright flash of lightening and the angry smash of thunder, when you can almost count off the time before he erupted, so tightly wound up he usually was. But it wasn’t that. There was something far more important occupying John’s mind, something a bit more pressing than Matthew’s latest dig.

A fare with a suit on and carrying a briefcase and dragging a bag with wheels behind him that he picked up at the airport in the late-afternoon, exactly the type he totally tunes out for the sake of his own mental health, such as it was, chirpily announced how happy he was to be back in Vancouver, it had been twenty-five years.

“Twenty-five years?” John asked, the fare thinking the question was directed to him. But it wasn’t, because John cruised through a red light completely unaware of cars honking, a pedestrian scurrying, and the fare in the back seat shrieking. “Twenty-five years,” he repeated, his eyes bugging out more than usual. He glanced at the trip sheet on the seat beside him to confirm what had dawned on him: Yes it was November 19. It wasn’t twenty-five years, but it was exactly twenty-four years ago when the pact was agreed. He drifted through the red light—not something he did often, rest assured—frozen in the headlights of Matthew’s and Luke’s young and turned-on eyes in the dark and wet of that forest on the campus when they solemnly put their hands forward to each other and clasped the deal so along ago in those heady days when plans could still be made, when futures thought of as wide open.

The freaked fare in the back seat was under the mistaken impression John had fallen asleep, but in fact it was the opposite. John felt as though he had just been bolted awake after a twenty-four year slumber. I’ll have to time it just right, he thought to himself, when I get home for lunch, Matthew’s breakfast, Luke’s dinner. I’ll wait for it to be dead quiet, he plotted, pushing his fingers through his upright lawn of hair, when I drop this news on their heads.

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