And so here sat the three novelists one more time gathered around a table, this time outside at the café, this time maintaining a particularly silent stony silence. There was John holding the newspaper in front of his face to hide the look of horror plastered there, his novel about the Vatican-invented 1,000 years of history just an idea floating beyond his grasp like a dream constantly beyond reach of memory at first awakening. To his left, there was Luke staring off into the low sky over the vegetable store, his novel about 9/11 and the intricate plan by one man to make it all happen also an idea only, as resistant to ink as a bag to water. Facing them both was Matthew, joining them from across the street and falling immediately into their black hole of despair, for his novel, this one about the Internet as a baby artificial intelligence, even more merely the wisp of an idea that didn’t even seem to have anything more to add to it once the title was written: “Spam.” It could easily be the title for all three novels.

“Should I get us coffees?” Matthew asked the window.

“Can’t get near it today, soccer game,” John deadpanned.

“Already got one,” Luke corrected him.

John stopped pretending to read and folded the paper, then folded it again, and then again and again until it was a tight small cube he was struggling mightily with until Luke reached over and took it out of his hand, relieving him of the burden.

“I’m very tired,” Luke said.

“You didn’t sleep?” asked Matthew, still staring at the blank sheet of glass in front of him.

“Not that kind of tired,” Luke replied.

What was this? Was Luke about to open up a conversation about the thing they hadn’t discussed, not in that manner, for 24 years and a bit, ever since they first made the pledge to each other at midnight in the middle of the dark campus? Neither John nor Matthew dared to move their eyes to anyone else’s, the contact could be as corrosive to their facades as acid. Luke could barely believe he had said what he said too. They were paralyzed by the fear that someone, one of them, was going to broach the subject. The silence grew to a roar, broken only by the café proprietor: “One coffee? You’ve been here for hours! I need the table, let’s go! Take your papers with you!”

The three men didn’t argue, they never did with the man anymore, you never win with him. They shambled across the street without looking out for traffic and didn’t even flinch when a huge Dodge Ram barrelled down on them, horn blaring, the crew-cut, polo-shirt-wearing man inside leaning out his window and yelling and shaking his fist, “Fucking idiot!”

They know, they know, no need to remind them.

They took up residence on the park bench to the side of the video store on the corner, the only one left for miles around. Here a bird-dog was obsessed with trying to flush the sparrows out of the hedge on the boulevard, unaware that his only skill in life was no longer needed and that he would never succeed in this circumstance anyway, city birds being more savvy than their country kin and not so flushable by a tired old and confused dog. The dog’s owner stood idly by staring at the dog and drooling even, as though that were his job and he also forgot why it was the only thing he did, or could do.

It didn’t take long for the security guards to arrive. One began writing the summons right away, the other stood back a few feet—back-up muscle in case of resistance, apparently, though resistance to what, besides a fluttering piece of paper, no one would be able to say. “Why us?” asked Luke. “That guy over there, he’s living under an upside-down grocery cart, he’s been there all week.”

“He’s got a mental problem,” the security guard spoke in a hushed tone as though anyone could possibly care what he said, let alone the victim of his slight.

“So if I start acting all weird and strange and shit, you’d leave me alone?” asked Luke.

“Nope,” the guard replied, signing his initials to the summons.

“Why not?”

“You’re not crazy enough yet,” the guard said, stuffing the paper in Luke’s shirt pocket.

He went away.

Matthew sniffed. “We’re never going to talk about it, are we,” he said.

“No,” said John. “A deal’s a deal.”

“But look at us,” Matthew persisted. “I saw you last night, in your room, when you said you were working.”

It didn’t even matter to John anymore that he was spied on, that someone saw him writhing in agony, unable to cross the floor to his desk because every one of his 640 muscles were cramped tight. “I thought I heard you upstairs working,” John said.

“I recorded the sound of my typing,” Matthew confessed in monotone. “I play it in a loop up loud when I hear you downstairs coming into your room. Sometimes I fall asleep with it on like that.”

Luke kept staring straight ahead. He thought he was the master of deception in the house.

“I thought you were working all night,” John said.

“I thought you were working all day,” Matthew replied.

“I thought . . . never mind,” said Luke.

“Oh my god!” a piercing female voice broke through the cloud like an arc of lightening out of nowhere. “I knew I’d find you around here!” The three men struggled like labour camp survivors to raise their faces to the light and see what disturbance to their darkly enshrouded, non-female, world this was. Surely it was an error.

“Melanie!” the translucent being with high-beams for eyes explained with her fingers pressing to her heart like someone shaping dough into a pan.

John was first. “Melanie?” It wasn’t much, but it beat the other two, still stunned by all the brightness.

Melanie was a girlfriend for a brief period way back at university. She was the last one to ever try competing with The Deadline contest, but she tried the hardest. She didn’t move into the house, but she spent a great deal of time there with the men before she bowed out in defeat and left them to their own future. And now, some two decades and a half later, here she was again, smelling and looking as fresh as a spring flower as she ever did.

“I can’t believe I finally found you!” she smiled so broadly. “Take me home, I’m going to cook for you!” She held up two bags of groceries. Even some cheese, Matthew could see through the bag.

“Our home?” John replied suspiciously.

“You still live in your mom’s house, don’t you?” Melanie asked, reaching out as though she was even going to take his hand in hers. John—none of them—had felt a female hand in theirs since forever.

“But it’s not . . . “ John paused searching for the right word. “It’s not clean.”

“Show me!” she chimed back. She would not be dissuaded. There was no deflecting her. Her insistence was all the more effective for not being overtly insistent. Melanie could say “no” in ways that made you say all the “no”s.

She noticed the boarded up window, the missing railing, the kicked-up fridge on the porch, and the roughly 24 years of accumulated dust and soot lying on the sills since they were last wiped, by her. She was there the night of the vow at midnight in the forest at the middle of the campus, hiding behind a tree. It was a big night for her too: she fell in love at the very moment she overheard it. That’s what she remembered two-and-a-half decades—and eight jobs, four cities, two careers and one husband—later while half-tanked on a bottle of wine watching the endless loop of war and tragedy on the TV news in a hotel room in a city she couldn’t remember the name of. And that was only three nights ago: her now ex-boss, not to mention her now ex-husband, were still leaving increasingly desperate messages at that nameless hotel in that nameless city. “I see you haven’t changed!” she remarked overly cheerfully, stepping over the woodpile and straight into that house.

“A suitcase?” John asked himself, noticing one freshly parked on the porch.