“So we’re all writing the same novel, are we?” John said out loud to the passing rain drops as he dragged his heels up Commercial Drive one more time. A mid-40s woman in pink spandex shot him a hurtful glance from the bus shelter featuring a large-as-life ad picturing a mid-20s woman in pink spandex, smiling because she has “Fun-esse!”

Melanie’s words last night around the church door table stung him as much for its insight as for her presumption that a lot of scattered notes stuck to walls in a squalid room in a crooked house add up to someone writing a novel.

A new sleeping bag appeared in the doorway to the beauty salon, all lumpy with a curled-up body inside. A nice sleeping bag, too, John noted. New looking. And the guy inside it was sleeping in well past eight. Must be another new casualty, he thought. Were it not for the crooked crazy house his mother bequeathed to him lo those many years ago, it could very well be him snuggled up inside that thing holding onto his boots for dear life.

You give yourself to art or you don’t, John concluded. There is no half way. “Oh, you can make craft,” he said out loud again, sitting across a table from that dim, blankly staring host in the radio studio in his head. “You can do craft in your spare time, build a train set in your basement or write a bunch of words in a particular order. Sing in the shower as you get ready for work salting up the fries or screwing heads on nuclear bombs.” He crossed the street without looking, and flipped a bird even to a driver who didn’t mind stopping and didn’t even tap his horn. It’s one of those days. “You have to live art.” He was at once struck by the profundity of the sentence and at the same time the bland cliché of it.

He arrived at the café. On the morning of September 11, 2001, at the very same café, the buildings fell in slow motion on the small screen nestled in a corner above the big front windows. But on the huge screen dominating the length of the café inside, a soccer game played out for the enjoyment of a crowd of patrons, only some of whom now and then shot a fleeting glance over their shoulder at the other screen showing history getting restarted. So goes literature.

So what if a pope from a thousand years ago figured out that the Church chronology was a fraud? If aliens landed today, John thought, it’d be news in the morning and then it would be back to the soccer. Not even real life, real history, happening right in front of everyone’s faces, captures anyone’s attention anymore, so what hope is there for a fake history happening a world and a millennium away? Why write, was the question weighing down John’s shoulders today. That was the end result of Melanie’s observation. Twenty-four years into a writing project, and he was confronted with that question again. Isn’t that something to ask, and answer, on day one?

Out the big window beneath the quiet television screen showing a tall blonde actress badly playing a hoop-and-stick game with emaciated black kids amidst a swirl of dirt, a pale and heavy man with a baseball cap went by looking like he’d just come from the doctor where he’d learned he had a day to live. A woman pushing a stroller stuffed with empty plastic shopping bags and a few empty milk jugs rushed by the other way, rushing where, for what? There’s a million stories in the city. Only thing is, none of them are very interesting.

The truth is, without some lies to beef it up, truth is so vacant no one cares about it, and like the proverbial tree in the forest, if truth is said and no one listens, is there truth at all? If God landed in a swirl of dust right there on the sidewalk between the bike and the parking meter, John thought . . . . “Hey look,” he imagined he would nudge the next guy along the counter, who’d look up from his newspaper long enough to go “huh!” And no longer. “God,” he’d say, motioning with his head to the bearded guy in the flowing white robes outside the window of the café. “Uh huh,” the other guy would say, not looking up again. It’s not that he’d disbelieve it reall was God, he’d just be immersed at that moment in the far more intriguing implications of a 3-2 win by Arsenal football club the night before.

So the Church fabricated a thousand years of fake history. So what. A fiction lies in the centre of truth, but truth lives in the backseat of an old station wagon at the corner of Salsbury and Grant sporting bright red “tow this junk away” stickers, and fiction is the monster tensely crouched in the pouncing position behind John’s door upstairs at home.

“We’re all writing the same novels!” John repeated to himself, blowing out his mouth like a bug landed on his lower lip. We, meaning all novelists in the world, could be writing the same novels, word for word, and who would notice? He drank down the last of his cup. Outside the rain started again. Across the street, an older woman completely without shape or form picked through apples an infuriatingly long time before finding one, one! she dropped in her bag before turning, staring at another big box of some other kind of apples, and dumping her bag out to start the whole routine all over again. She’s living in the moment a little too much, John thought. Somewhere between spending ten minutes picking one apple and spending 25 years writing one novel is the place to be.

The buxomy smiling actress should come to his crooked crazy house and try mixing it up with the bunch of failed writers holed up inside that living mess some day, she wouldn’t be so cheerful anymore, would she. Starving little black kids facing a future of nothing but eating dust ain’t got nothing on John, Matthew and Luke. She’d be in the Betty Ford clinic nursing wrist wounds if she spent a day with them.

Which brought John back to Melanie. She said she left her husband and her job the week before, didn’t she? Was that right? Did he ask her about that at all? Did he give her any sympathy? And she left whatever that was for this? How in the world does a house full of failed writers beat anything? A terrible mistake had been made. It was a disease he caught and had transmitted to his two erstwhile friends, infecting them just as desperately as he had been. How long before Melanie, still functional, still employable, still delusional enough to have an outlook on life negative or positive, fell victim to the same disease by stint of hanging around the quarantined terminal ward known as That House, the house dogs scurry past with heads down, the house mothers take their childrens’ hands in their own, tightly, to pass by?

She must be ejected, John decided, and ejected before Matthew and Luke get to her. They were the sicker ones: they still thought they were writers writing novels. She’ll believe them! She already thinks all that tap-tapping and notebook scratching you can hear all through the house all hours of the day and night is the sound of writers writing. That’s why she said we were all writing the same novel, John twigged as though he saw God descend out the window. “She really thinks we’re all writing novels!” The guy down the counter pulled up the newspaper around his ears as though escaping through the porthole it offered. Must have said that out loud too, John thought to himself. A fake cell-phone headset would solve that problem.