The morning after John’s Big Announcement, Luke found the bookstore its usual quiet self, “quiet as a mouse pissing on cotton” he once read in The New York Times, a phrase he drew a line under in every copy of the paper that day. He stuck his nose out the front door to look up and down the street to see if any potential customers were out there, and, seeing none, tucked his chin down and stepped quickly up the rain-beaten sidewalk under the mass of brooding uniform greyness that is Vancouver’s November sky. He slipped into the even darker, and even more brooding, Café of the Sun (brooding on account of all the unpaid artists and single moms listlessly pushing their forks through their cooled breakfasts there), to buy an oversized muffin for cheap. On the walls, a new exhibit: someone had obviously thought it would be a great idea to grab the usual suspects who shamble up and down Commercial Drive searching for cigarette butts in café ashtrays like so many pigeons in a choreography around a spilled bag of croutons, and lock them in a photo studio to try to make beauty out of what is simply not. Well, things must not be as bad as they seem, Luke concluded (examining the prints on the walls closely to find what else there was to fault in them), or else he’d see himself up on that wall too, wouldn’t he.

There was no time this morning to nod blankly over the bookstore counter back at Chuck, the big-band-era musician who drives Winnebagos up and back from Arizona for retired tourists. Chuck visited every day to recite breathlessly (sometimes from too much excitement, more often from carrying his heavy frame up the street too fast), all the revealing and obscure passages that he uncovered in the five newspapers he reads everyday, front to back, including comics, horoscopes, and obituaries. “Did you see Wednesday’s National Post?” he began, even before opening the front door, so that all Luke heard was, “ . . . ‘ay’s National Post?”

“No,” Luke replied, not looking up from his laptop computer on the counter, blank screen as usual. He knew the question, it was always “Did you see?” and he knew the answer, it was always “No,” even when he had passed his eyes over every word in every paper desperately looking for something good to use in his novel.

How does Chuck find this stuff? he would typically ask himself while, hovering before him on the other side of the counter, the visage of Chuck’s wagging tongue played peek-a-boo behind his flapping jaw, all enshrouded in a mist of spit ejected with every over-excited consonant—part of the Conspiracy Buff code of conduct. But not today. Today Luke was going to work on his telepathic and telekinesis techniques: he stared into Chuck’s blinking and bugged-out eyes and repeated (to himself of course, he’s never cruel), “Go away, go away now, go away Chuck, leave, go now.”

It worked as well as it ever does, which is not at all. Once Luke had revealed to Chuck that he was trying to write a novel (not just for 24 years, but since he was 7 years old), and that this one was about 9-11, Chuck had appointed himself Official Research Assistant. That was great, except Chuck was never interested in researching anything Luke told him he needed help with, and instead showed up each morning with a stack of newspaper clippings—not whole articles, but just pieces of them—full of underlines and triple question marks following quotations. If Luke were to use any of it, the task would be like deciphering the Rosetta Stone after it had been shattered into a thousand pieces. What sense could be made of an unconnected three-inch chunk of some article—subject, author, date, and publication unknown—in which the word “and” has been angrily circled many times in red ink?

Still, Luke was loath to admit that, wild and disjointed as Chuck was with his theories and his evidence, much of what he had said would later emerge from other sources as true, only in more coherent and sensible forms. Luke started listening to Chuck shortly after the Alfred P Murrah building attack in Oklahoma years earlier. For three days following that event, everyone from police authorities to sage newspaper columnists to sputtering right-wing talk radio nuts were saying “The Arabs, the Arabs, the Arabs!” Chuck dropped by about an hour after the news broke and said “The Michigan Militia.”

“The who?” Luke replied, for it was still in that time before anyone had heard of militias in America, except for Chuck. Chuck went to a shelf in the store where the most harmless gardening, country living, and Harrowsmith magazines curled over. His hand went right to one that no one ever bought, a farm implements magazine with the absolutely most boring covers. Since when did Chuck even know we had anything besides his newspapers? Luke wondered.

Chuck flipped through the farm implements magazine in front of Luke’s face. “What do you see?” he asked. “I don’t know, what am I looking for?” Luke replied, humouring the crazy nut, harmless as all the others. “Notice the ads?”

“Not really,” Luke sliced his hand into the pages at random to stop the annoying flipping and settled his eyes on one of the ads to try hard to get Chuck’s point, whatever it could be. It was a very lacklustre black-and-white ad apparently selling some kind of obscure attachment to plough mechanisms, for sale at a particular address in some never-heard-of county in Wisconsin.

“Uh huh,” Chuck said in that irritating “Now you’re getting it!” tone. He flipped the page to another ad. It was the same size, also black-and-white, laid out in the very same way, this one selling some kind of cow-milking machine attachment, this time from another address in some other also never-heard-of county, this time in Minnesota.

Chuck flipped the pages again randomly to another page, and another ad, again the same thing. The magazine was full of these strange ads always selling objects you can’t imagine anyone looking for, and always with an address in the middle of nowhere, as though anyone would actually go to a place like that to get one of those strange objects, without at least phoning—none of the ads featured phone numbers. Chuck had a point: this was an odd magazine. “What gives?” Luke asked.

“Safe-houses,” replied Chuck, closing the magazine and putting the thing back up there on the shelf as though it were just another magazine in the store, but of course, for Luke, now he couldn’t take his eyes off the thing, nor off anyone who sauntered around anywhere near it in the store forever thereafter.

“Safe-houses?” he asked.

“The militias’ safe-houses, to be exact.” replied Chuck. “Each of those ads tells members of the militias where they can go for safety, these are addresses of cell members, places you can hole up for a while if you’re being hunted, or if you’ve just pulled some caper. I’ve mapped them out, and they are about as evenly spaced across the whole continental United States as you can get. I measured on the map, you are never more than about six hours travelling time in a car away from one or another of these addresses, no matter where you are in the whole country. This magazine is distributed by normal distribution companies to stores like this and hardware and general stores in every city and town in the whole country. Wherever you are, if you’re in trouble, all you need to do is pop in to any bookstore, newsstand, general store, or hardware store in the country, find this magazine—they’re never sold out because no one ever buys them—and flip through till you find your nearest safe house. When they catch the guys who blew up the building in Oklahoma City, it will be either at one of the addresses in the ads in this magazine, or on the way to it, mark my words.”

“Nut,” Luke said when Chuck left the store that day, the news on the radio coming on just then, reporting that a business run by Arabs in Los Angeles had been fire-bombed.

Three days later, Timothy McVeigh, a Michigan Militia member, was arrested for the Oklahoma City bombing. The road he was stopped on for a routine traffic violation was, Luke found, looking over a map, in the middle of nowhere, and about half-a-mile from an address in an ad in that magazine, one selling a kind of bolt for one particular kind of grain thresher. “I’ll be damned,” Luke muttered, making a note of it in his novel notebook.

“This was buried deep in the newspaper, page five of the business section, down below the fold, a three-inch article, hardly even a headline,” Chuck was saying through a haze of spit droplets. “Boeing,” he summarized the article for Luke, “announces it is revamping and upgrading its emergency remote control systems for its airplanes, and this is news cause Hewlett-Packard got the contract.”

“And?” Luke knew there was always a punchline, and ever since the Oklahoma City incident, usually a pretty good punchline too, if not always readily apparent.

“Ever since 9-11, they’ve always denied their planes could ever be flown by remote control,” Chuck tapped the side of his head with his bundle of rolled-up newspapers and pulled open the door. “Make sure you get that in your novel, would you?” he said, as though there ever really was a novel.

Well, now there would be, wouldn’t there. And sometime soon, in the coming year in fact, if he expected to carry on past the end of the deadline with this charade of being a writer. He made a note of Chuck’s 9-11 remote-controlled airplane observation in his novel notebook.