Modern Fables
I've not known Noah long when I ask if he’s ever killed an animal.
I’ve not known Noah long when I ask if he’s ever killed an animal. The poplars are bare and not yet budding, and a late spring snow moulders on the grass along the riverbank. Over a footbridge in Prince’s Island Park, Noah is carrying my enormous purse—a fringed satchel my rich aunt Lee bought me the summer my sister and her new husband visited from Australia. Likely a consolation gift, it’s one I rarely use, embroidered and flashy and fringed. I feel embarrassed that I brought the bag along and either impressed or concerned that Noah will shoulder such garish femininity. He has continually proved himself to be more fashionable than me, with his gold wire-frame glasses, collared linen shirts, and felt navy baseball hat. Noah has my hand in his grip, and the air smells of thawing earth.
“I have,” I say, flaunting my personality like a peacock’s train. “A hamster. I was three or four. Playing with it—him—in our basement. He was running on the carpet, outside the plastic ball. He darted under a rocking chair.” I pause for effect, Noah’s eyes widen. “Naturally, I crawled after him.” I am sharply aware of the people around us, evening strollers, in the park. What a good-looking couple, they are all thinking. “The slider? On the rocking chair? When I pushed up the seat to look below?” Freeing my fingers from Noah, I fling my arms open then clap, a crocodile’s snapping jaw. “He wasn’t entirely dead. Maybe the lungs had collapsed? There was blood. A wheezing. My father had to drown it in the bathtub.” Noah laughs. As I had known he would. “Obviously, I was devastated.” “Not exactly murder,” he says. The path turns through a stand of pines, and I shiver in the sudden shade. “My father was the one!” I say with perhaps too much vigour. What I want is for Noah to reveal an unassailable autobiographical fact. Even something small will do. It’s not that he’s withholding. Conversely, Noah seems almost childishly candid. “I didn’t grow up in Red Deer,” I had said on our first date, legs dangling from a low concrete wall and licking an artisanal ice-cream sandwich. “I was only born there. We moved away when I was two.” “I’m the opposite. I grew up there,” Noah said, “but I was born in Eritrea.” A blistering day had emerged like a mania from a grey sub-zero April. A ghost of fish flies hummed around us. The concrete was pocked and warm. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know where that is?” Noah waved away the flies, my admission. “No one does.” I watched the cloud of insects, rising and falling like a lung, as Noah told me of his unknown country: an embattled independence from Ethiopia, a brutal dictator, one of Africa’s deadliest wars. Noah’s mother will never return—though her parents, his grandparents, still live there. If Noah himself were to visit he would meet with compulsory military service. They—Noah, his mother, and sister—befell the Albertan prairie as refugees. They’d been living in Hamburg, Noah in the womb, his father a history professor, when he, the father, returned to Eritrea as what Noah called a freedom fighter and was killed in the war. “We fled to Germany because, and this might sound weird, the dictator and my father were great enemies. They’d gone to high school together. It might sound weird,” Noah said, “but see there’s one prestigious private school in Eritrea, where all the elites go.” Noah’s voice sounded like mine: high-pitched, intense. Like he was more used to silence than speech. His fingers were crawling high on my leg beneath the pocket of my shorts. “We couldn’t get permanent residency in Germany, so we came to Canada. My mother’s sister was living here—my aunt. We were one of like five Black families in town.” I thought of the last time I was in Red Deer, to visit my grandfather at the same hospital where I was born. My mother had suggested sushi from a nearby strip mall. “They have sushi?” I said. “I think it’s new,” my mother replied. In the parking lot, three baseball hats shouldered loose of a sports bar and into a testicled pickup truck. As they drove off, pumping fists out their windows, they began to chant: “white power.” Mid-afternoon in Sunday sunshine. “Is that some kind of irony?” I had said to my mother. Noah hates nationalism. He once hated his father, too. “Who leaves a pregnant wife and an infant to go fight for a country?” In his mouth, the word country sounded the way I pronounce words like douchebag, sports, and evangelical. I, of course, have no answer to such questions, which I have never had to ask. My complaints against my own father are things like unwanted cross-country ski lessons. On this first date, Noah told me that he’d been accepted to medical school, that he wants to be a psychiatrist. “It’s so much school,” he said. “So much life.” A few years back, his aunt—the same aunt he and his mother came to live with in Red Deer by way of Germany—died by suicide. “She went insane,” is what he said. This didn’t sound like a very medical definition. The cream from my mint lavender sandwich had pooled on the cement beneath us. I’d forgotten to ask for a napkin at the organic grocers. “She had assisted dying,” he continued. “The case went all the way to the top courts.” By then I was teary, nodding with sympathy. Noah’s hand was kneading my thigh. In so rough a manner I finally said, “You’re hurting me.” I said this with a lilt, like a joke.And if I balked at a tale of familial devastation, if I questioned someone who’d faced sharp-toothed things I could scarcely fathom, what kind of person was I?He apologized, we laughed. From men, I’d come to expect mild expressions of sexual aggression. There was something else troubling me. I felt I knew all about the refusal of physician-assisted dying for Canadians suffering from mental illness. I had opinions. If you wanted to die, if your existence was psychically unbearable, why or how was this any different from a life of unendurable physical pain? Why should you be denied the right to a dignified death? But in the present circumstance how could anyone say such a thing? And if I balked at a tale of familial devastation, if I questioned someone who’d faced sharp-toothed things I could scarcely fathom, what kind of person was I? “But wait,” I might say. “I read in Maclean’s that assisted dying is not granted in your aunt’s circumstances.” At home and not yet feeling any loyalty to Noah, I flipped open my computer. In Canada, the Internet agreed, Medical Assistance in Dying is available only to those with irreversible, “grievous and irremediable medical conditions” whose death is likely in the foreseeable future. Such conditions are constitutionally invalid for psychiatric illnesses, usually because of the “foreseeable death” clause. Although there is likewise much handwringing over what comprises the “irreversible” and “irremediable.” Mental illness, hopeful people like to believe, is neither. So, it was with a pang of ugly relief that I discovered one case that seemed to possibly corroborate Noah’s story. Under a constitutional amendment, the Alberta Court of Appeal had granted “E.F.” access to physician-assisted dying for a psychiatric condition described as “severe conversion disorder”—a mental illness with horrific physical symptoms: E.F. was nearly immobile, unable to eat, and suffered migraines so painful her eyelids fused shut. Her quality of life, according to the Court, “had deteriorated to the point of non-existence.” “This must be the aunt!” I thought, penitent and welling up over the idea of a suffering so thorough it was considered annihilation. I clicked closed my laptop, side-stepped a rattling coil of mistrust. It was in Alberta! The one historical case! A 58-year-old woman who must have been someone’s aunt. Poor Aunt! Poor Noah! “I killed a cat once,” Noah says, swinging my purse under his shoulder. Like his voice, his gait bounces. “My girlfriend’s parents’ cat.” “Oh no!” I say. “No!” Already I am calmed. “Her father, Bill?” he says. “We got on. I miss him.” “And the girlfriend?” Noah shrugs. “The family had to attend a funeral. The cat was a diabetic.” “Oh my god.” “He needed an insulin shot three times a day.” “And it let you?” “He didn’t like it.” A thin breeze moves the dry grass along the riverbank. “I went over one day and the cat was just dead.” “Oh,” I say, deflated. This sounds like a natural-causes scenario. Grotesque admissions always strike me as more honest—the allure of the depraved confession. “You didn’t, maybe, forget to drop by and give him a shot?” Noah’s eyebrows furrow in what looks like alarm, possibly disgust. “Surely, they didn’t think it was your fault. He was old. And had diabetes!” “No, they didn’t think it was my fault. But I felt terrible.” Despite the uprightness of the disclosure, I am pleased. Noah once had a girlfriend whose father liked him. They “got on.” This alleged girlfriend’s family entrusted Noah with their beloved diabetic pet. “I killed another hamster,” I whisper, on a roll now. “The class pet!” Noah’s laugh is like his voice—unabashed, pitchy, and loud enough to draw stares. “We all loved Pamela. And everyone was offered a turn taking her home for the weekend. Learning responsibility, etcetera.” I draw a theatrical breath. “As you’d imagine, I carried her cage home one Friday, proud and superior. Everything was fine. But on Saturday morning she was stiff, her little paws curled, her tiny teeth sticking out the side of her jaw.” A goose flaps furiously at a rival and resettles atop the moat surrounding the park. “It was much, much worse than when I killed the first one,” I say, “because I knew I’d have to tell the others. Everyone would know something bad about me. Something unforgivable.” Noah’s cheeks puff, a look of comic distress. A streetlamp flickers to life. His glasses catch the light. “My mother took me to a pet store,” I say. “We found another hamster. One just like Pamela. They all look the same? We replaced her.” “You didn’t tell anyone?” “My mother called Mrs. Baldwin. They decided it should be a secret, because it would be upsetting.” A flock of geese alights, wings blackening sky. “But I knew.” My breath is visible in the dusk. “It was a different Pamela. And everyone thought she was still the same. I felt ashamed, alone in my secret knowledge. But,” I flash a sly smile, “it was also weirdly powerful.” We’ve stopped under a streetlight. Noah is holding our hands together above our heads, as though we are playing London Bridge. “Probably for most children it happens when they learn the truth about Santa Claus. But my mother told my sister and me about that when we were infants. She didn’t want to lie to us! That’s her excuse. We were only three and four.” Noah starts to sway beneath our bridge. I wonder, briefly, if perhaps he’s bored. “It was shocking. It had never occurred to me. The idea that anyone, at any time, could deceive you deliberately.” Noah drops my hands. “The lie lasted the whole year. And I was in on it.”
To be fair, neither my sister nor I cared much about Santa Claus—very early on, instead of a talking Teddy Ruxpin doll, he had left us hideous brown suitcases. According to my mother, we took the news with bored, sophisticated blinks. I was so young I don’t recall the unveiling. But I have been told that, with preternatural quickness, I put bearded and bestial fallacy together to deduce that this meant there was also no Easter Bunny. Over this revelation, I was heartbroken. “Quite astonishing,” my mother will say, “you figuring that out on your own, given your age. Oh, you cried then. The Easter Bunny! The Easter Bunny!” A habit of my mother’s, this sharp overestimation of my abilities, especially my intelligence. Recently, reflecting on my imperious deportment toward the teachers of my youth, I mentioned how appalling it was, how insulting, that I’d assumed myself smarter than most of them. To which my mother replied, “Well, you probably were.” Likely to make up for what our psychologist mother feared would lead to some maladjusted trauma syndrome, the Easter Bunny was always lavish at our house. Not only were chocolate eggs hidden, but gifts of all kinds—including, one fateful Easter Sunday, a real live cottontail. The rabbit was a caramel-coloured lady whom my sister and I, budding intelligentsia, named Taffy. My mother procured a hay bale from the farm near Lacombe, where my grandfather worked, and my father arranged the hay into a burrow next to our suburban basement window. Downstairs, the window opened directly into the burrow, so we could bring Taffy inside to play without having to muddy our white suburban socks. Taffy was a buxom rabbit; nevertheless, I steered her clear of the rocking chair. More than anyone, our adopted stray, Maurice—a misanthropic tuxedo cat as clever, corpulent, and standoffish as I was—seemed enthralled by Taffy. Like a teenager with a dime bag and a pop-can pipe, he would hide in a bush or beside the porch stairs, pupils dilated, twitching. He would wait for Taffy to emerge from her burrow. He would watch her chew grass. He would slink along the toolshed. Eventually, he would pounce. For half a minute, he would chase Taffy, the two of them darting in trapezoids beneath the crabapple tree. Taffy had muscular kicking legs, and, being svelte, could easily outrun him. It seemed to give them both something to do. In July, the Laughlins were going on vacation and asked if we might look after Blackie, their tiny Netherland Dwarf whose name announced an ingenuity rivalling our Taffy’s. My mother and father found Blackie’s chase-and-mount games, viewed peeping-Tom-like through the blinds of our kitchen window, hilarious. Heeding the aphorism about sex and rabbits, my mother had asked and the Laughlins had assured her that Blackie was female. I worried she was hurting Taffy, though Blackie was half her size. Once, I even saw Taffy growl and bite Blackie, who was riding atop her back. A rabbit’s growl—if you’ve not heard one before—is a guttural, alarming sound. One month later Blackie was home with the Laughlins, and Taffy gave birth to seven baby bunnies. When my father reached through the window into the burrow to try to retrieve one for us, Taffy growled and lashed out with her teeth. Maurice bristled his whiskers and licked his maw to show his enthusiasm for the new babies. Taffy, though, seemed nervous when he was around. She sat hunched and motionless, her round black eyes unblinking.
Against their own instincts, they’d come to trust him.My sister and I believed Maurice worthy of his gentlemanly coat. As if to force a point about the tamed nature of all we knew, we would catch Maurice and, after some struggle, press him into a laundry basket where we had gathered the baby bunnies. We formed a fence with our arms, lest he try to leap out. I have photographic evidence: Maurice, yellow-eyed and impassive, stretched out on his fat beside five smoke-coloured bundles snuggled up in a row like marshmallow Peeps, likely mistaking his warm flank for that of their mother’s. My own mother said, later, that they’d probably gotten overly familiar with Maurice. Against their own instincts, they’d come to trust him. Not long after that photograph was taken, we arrived home from an afternoon trip abroad to find bunny parts, bunny carcasses, and clots of bunny fur strewn about the backyard grass. I remember spotting on the bricked patio a severed foot. My mother hurried us inside. I’d only ever seen so much blood once before, when our needle-toothed terrier, Kipling, was hit by a car. My mother held Kipling in a red-soaked blanket as my father drove us all to the euthanizing veterinarian. We had, it seemed, some bad luck with pets. Only one baby bunny survived. I don’t know how Taffy felt about Maurice after the massacre. I know my parents were annoyed with the parents of Lonnie Laughlin. Perhaps sex is hard to discern, with rabbits. Although my mother believed that the Laughlins knew we wouldn’t house a male Blackie. A lie of convenience with unintended consequences. To my mind, it wasn’t really anyone’s fault. Despite all those naps together in the laundry basket with Maurice on his best, most un-catlike behaviour. And us knowing full well that Maurice himself was two-faced, and a killer: countless sparrows, the occasional mouse, a fish from our tank. The afternoon of the massacre, I asked my horrified mother if I might keep the severed paw. Lonnie Laughlin, I said, had a purple rabbit’s foot keychain. It meant good luck.
Past liars I’ve loved were meticulous. Their lies were careful as mice, intentional as owls, and shadowed something ruinous. Noah, on the other hand, seems guileless. A story will change or repeat itself in a novel but harmless way. A daily happening sounds outlandish but meaninglessly so. He’s having a tooth extracted. Later, a cavity has been filled. He quits his job as an economist for the provincial government. On his last day of work, he’s asked to fire an elderly colleague. “On your last day?” I say. My friend Lydia says, “I didn’t know there was a Ministry of Finance in Calgary.” “I didn’t know there was a country called Eritrea,” I snap back. He tells me three different stories of three different friends who have left professorships for minimum-wage work—cashier, barista, security guard. In the space of a week, this seems absurd, and I can’t help feel a jab at my own doctoral ambitions. Noah has left his government economist job—where he claims to have worked for the past eight years—to pen a novel. After he starts medical school in September, he won’t have time to write. He runs his own business. Something to do with “analytics” and economic policy. “Have you heard of CSIS?” he asks. “I’ve heard of CSIS.” “They’re a client. I’m writing a report on the economic downturn and involuntary celibacy. You’ve heard of Incel?” “Either he’s lying about everything he says,” I tell my mother, “or he’s the most extraordinary person I’ve ever met.” I wish against my instincts to believe the latter, so I steady myself, smiling and nodding. I ask pleasant, clarifying questions that only further obfuscate matters. One night, Noah tells me we can’t watch a movie at his apartment because the kitchen is being painted—a smell so noxious that he’s been staying at his sister’s. A week later in the kitchen, I remark on the new colour, and he looks at me like I’m unhinged. “It’s not new,” he says. Then, something clicks behind his glasses. The building manager’s brother has died. This, somehow, has halted painting progress.
On July 2, we celebrate Noah’s birthday. I give him a cable-knit ivory sweater and, because he loves mystery novels, a copy of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. I make Negronis, steak, and a birthday cake from scratch. We sit cross-legged on my front porch, knees touching. We smoke a joint and listen to Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. The stars come out and I am drunk when I think, for the first time in a long time, that I might learn how to be happy.
Several nights later at a pizzeria with a quasi-racist name, we are ordering beer when Noah places his driver’s license on the table. I pick it up. A country singer is plucking a guitar from a small corner stage. At a table across from ours sits a former boyfriend—also a country singer, and a person I’d prefer to ignore. The restaurant is sweltering. I click down the license, I pick it up again. “I don’t understand this,” I say. Noah’s smile looks cartoonish and uncomfortably wide. “Yes?” “This says your birthday is July 5.” “It does?” “What do you mean it does?” When I look away from Noah, I meet eyes with my old boyfriend. His expression is blank, as though we’ve never met. Noah opens his hands, moves his lips to speak, but then says nothing. “Yes,” I say for him. “It does.” And on the fat of my hand, that hard kneading of his I’ve told him I do not like. “Honestly,” he says, sounding almost angry, “I don’t care. A birthday is not important to me like it is to you. It’s not something I think about. I misspoke.”To question these kinds of facts would land me in crazed territory, a geography I am careful to avoid.Well, I say, I’ve heard quite a number of misspoken things: the kitchen paint, the tooth, a barista’s career. Said aloud, my complaints sound petty, not very unlike the embellishments I am prone to make when reaching to impress someone. I feel a flush of embarrassment and quickly back down. Noah is so cheerfully understanding and with an explanation for each incident. I do not ask, however, about the aunt’s suicide, the circumstances of his government job, the CSIS contract. To question these kinds of facts would land me in crazed territory, a geography I am careful to avoid. Besides, a birthdate isn’t the species of lie to which I’m accustomed. At best, it seems harmless; at worst, a Coleridgean breed of “motiveless malignity,” perhaps borne of Noah’s insecurities. Something to treat with tender caution, like a trapped animal. A week later, I am in St. Albert celebrating another birthday: my aunt Lee’s 65th. A lavish backyard party—a food truck parked out front, a magician—where I am tasked with avoiding an increasingly drunk truck driver from High Prairie. Dusty is the son of a cousin of my uncle to whom my aunt has introduced me by saying, “And here: my single niece.” Relentlessly cornered by Dusty, I comment pointedly about a boyfriend “who is going to medical school.” It is said to discourage and deflate. Graceless, yes. And not something I’d wanted to reveal at this family affair—beside my aunt’s pool, and my cousins with their spritely children in a rainbow of bathing suits splashing and shrieking with delight, and all the proud grandparents of whom my father is not one (as he will soon loudly note), and the landscaping and stonework and professionally-trained Irish Setter. My sunglasses have fogged up with anxious sweat when my cousin’s cousin Arthur—there with his beautiful blonde wife and their willowy children—is at my elbow, beneficently supplanting Dusty. I haven’t seen Arthur since I was eight years old. Our shared cousins used to pick on him. Well. He and his wife are both physicians. They both, she says, sidling over, went to the University of Calgary. In fact, Arthur works there, in the medical clinic. “So, your partner,” she says, the only person at this party besides me and Arthur who would use this epithet, “he must have just started the program?” “Yes,” I say, relieved to have come upon friends in the desert, “he’s starting in the fall.” “But,” a frown like she’s bitten an olive pit, “the program starts in July.” She goes to speak again, then appears to think better of it and turns to fix a strap on one of her perfect children’s suits. A cousin and I stay up late with our family’s favourite pastime, binge drinking. Eventually, he asks why I haven’t brought my boyfriend. The last time I saw our grandfather, the Christmas before, I’d walked into my father’s house to tidings of how “the Jews are ruining Christmas.” “I mean, who is even racist against Jews anymore?” I say to my glass of whiskey. “He could at least update his religious prejudice to Muslims, like a modern racist.” Having usurped the bottom bunk from my cousin’s eldest son—who, like a young capitalist, woke me early with a toy alarm clock—the next day I am under-slept, hungover, and in no mood for car travel. Half an hour outside Red Deer, a red light fires on my dashboard. It is ominous, an exclamation mark inside a parenthesis. Naturally, I have no idea what the symbol means; my literary expertise surmises that the car is feverish, explanatory, and shouting. At the next rest stop, I pull off the highway and call Noah. Although he does not own a car himself, nor have I ever seen him captain a vehicle, I ask what I’m supposed to do. He suggests popping the hood. Reluctantly, I push open the door. But I am forced to slam it again, immediately. A swarm of wasps is darting about a row of adjacent garbage cans. The wasps are so numerous I can’t even crack the window. I start to overheat—a sickly, boozy roil. Noah says I should simply wait 15 minutes, then try the engine. Trapped in a sweltering car, a steady trickling behind my knees and wasps ticking at the windows, I feel lucky to have someone to call in an emergency. So rarely have I not felt alone in the world. Though, let’s be honest. Stranded on the side of a highway after attending a party where I have been introduced as one of two single guests, I can’t say I’m not. When I turn the ignition 10 minutes later, the fiery symbol is gone. The problem has solved itself. A clear and timely metaphor, I decide, for the present circumstances of my life.
To trust in another person, I tell myself, is one of our last remaining acts of faith.Because I’d pulled over, I missed the last half of a segment on CBC Radio about catfishing. Catfishing is an online dating scam: a catfish is, essentially, a liar. A crass manipulator whose victim, in turn, falls in love with his false persona, the catfish’s ruse is no accident. He extracts something—most often money—from his online paramour, then vanishes. Nothing about a catfish scam is real. Photos, jobs, and hometowns are taken from social media platforms and used by the scammer to create a pretend but quasi-verifiable life. The real owner of the stolen identity discovers the theft only when a jilted lover contacts him, usually through Facebook, to reprimand what she thinks is his callous behaviour, to lament the loss of her life savings. “What’s so appalling about it,” I say to Noah that evening, “is that these victims, they’re so lonely. And that’s exactly what’s being exploited. Can you imagine pretending to be in love with someone—especially a person willing to believe she’s in a relationship with someone she’s never met—can you imagine preying on this sad person’s deepest needs and insecurities? To blatantly lie to someone like this? It’s one of the worst things I can imagine.” I note that Noah seems particularly interested in the catfishing story. He asks all kinds of questions. When I tell him about my cousin’s cousin and his wife—both doctors, they say they’d be happy to talk to you about the program, Arthur works at the university, they want us to come over for dinner—he seems less so. It’s then that I say, in a voice of false cheer, “Tell me again when school starts?” “September,” he says, meeting my eye. “September.” There must be more than one intake, multiple medical-school commencements. Something I could surely and easily confirm. But to do so would be a betrayal. To trust in another person, I tell myself, is one of our last remaining acts of faith.
I suppose it depends on how you define the verb kill. Unequivocally, I killed the hamster beneath the rocking chair, clear cause and effect. But the second hamster, from my first-grade class? If something dies in your care, are you similarly culpable? Take Noah’s story about the diabetic cat. Let’s say he did forget the insulin shot. Is my mother to blame for the five goldfish poisoned when she haplessly cleaned their tank with bleach? What about our pets Frog and Toad, who died of a white fungus caught from unclean children’s hands? Or the newt I found dried up like a spider on our basement floor after someone forgot to re-lid the aquarium? The single baby bunny—grey-coated Smokey—who survived Maurice to one day disappear from the yard, throttled by a coyote, swooped by a hawk? To what extent does the irresponsibility of youth, a mistake, or even pure bad luck absolve? What makes an act unforgivable?
The outcome is what counts. And when the outcome is bad, I want someone to blame.Can you fault Maurice for being a cat? Or my sister and I with our laundry basket and camera? My father for not building an enclosure around the burrow? Perhaps it was the fault of the Laughlins for claiming Blackie was female. I used to think that even someone like a catfish deserved mercy, because he or she was so obviously damaged. What kind of decent person could behave this way? It would be a terrible existence to have to live with what you’d done. But I have come to believe, more and more, that neither the cause nor the intention matters. The outcome is what counts. And when the outcome is bad, I want someone to blame. Besides, most people have all their ruinous acts justified. I’m not sure how often the malicious suffer. To have my compassion, it seems some suffering is required. Noah is seeing a therapist. Or so he says. The details are vague. To describe the therapist after each supposed visit, he repeatedly uses the pronoun “they.” Likely because he doesn’t remember whether he’s already told me this therapist is a man or a woman. One detail is certain: therapy is meant to quell his unrelenting anxiety about medical school. I suspect he’s planning to use this crisis to “decide” that he doesn’t want to go after all. I am suspicious of almost everything he says now, and with good reason. It is bewildering how Noah seems utterly unable to keep track of his daily reports. Within only a few hours he’ll produce a contradictory statement about where he went that afternoon, his commute, or what he ate for dinner. Coached by my mother, I calmly say things like, “I’m having a hard time trusting you,” and, “I find it confusing and upsetting when your story changes.” “I have never lied to you,” he says one afternoon. Obviously, we are fighting. Earlier, he’d told me he was with Methuselah. Now he’s trotted out a story about lunching with Rachel. “I’m not saying you’re lying.” My voice shakes with calm. “But you’ve told me two different things. I don’t understand this discrepancy. It happens all the time.” We are standing at the bottom of a wooden staircase that leads to the top of a bluff. “It’s making me feel crazy.” “I don’t know what you want me to say. I was with Rachel. I’m sorry,” he adds, his eyes turning cold under the blazing sun, “if I’m not being precise enough with my language. I’ve never,” he shakes his head, “had someone question my character like this.” “Well,” I say, “if you can’t explain your imprecise language, I can’t continue to see you.” “This is very disappointing,” he replies. On the bluff, the city has set goats free to graze the northwest hills. I watch a large goat head-butt a smaller one away from his patch of grass. The little goat doesn’t seem to mind. “What a waste,” Noah adds. As he walks away, I remember an incident that occurred a few weeks prior. It was a Sunday. We’d gone out for breakfast and were strolling through the city holding hands. Noah was describing the time he’d met Fred Durst in an airport. They’d bonded over Noah’s skateboard. “Fred’s a really nice guy,” he said. “Seriously.” Out of nowhere, or so it seemed to me, someone was shouting. The man looked high and dishevelled. His words were jumbled but one emerged with clarity from his rage: “Blackie.” Noah stopped and turned, and I could feel his arm trembling. They shouted back and forth beneath the skyscrapers, and for a moment I was certain there would be violence. By then I, too, was shaking, in tears and unsure if I ought to intervene. Back at my apartment, Noah had spent the afternoon comforting me. “It’s okay,” he said when I said it wasn’t. “It happens.” He shrugged and smiled, but he looked defeated. I understood, then, the distance between us. And I was alone and ashamed in my secret knowledge. Upon hearing the shouted slur, what first came to my mind was an image of Blackie, the Laughlins’ Netherland Dwarf. The Cumming School of Medicine’s website informs me that acceptances go out in May—weeks after I first met Noah. Programs start July first. My cousins’ cousin Arthur has thrice invited me and my “medical Padawan partner” over for dinner. I keep dodging. It seems I too have become a liar.
I am surprised by how difficult it is to find irrefutable proof of deception.Noah leaves me five voicemail messages. He wants to reconcile. Unannounced, he stops by after work. In reality, Noah is a clerk at an automobile registry, about which he has Kafkaesque and unusually authentic-sounding stories that include thwarted driver’s license applicants calling him “little Napoleon” and giving him double middle fingers. At my door he offers roses. Very well, I say, but all is not forgiven. Nothing is resolved. If he wants to talk, I’ll listen like a reasonable person. However, I’ve given up on honest naïveté. I doubt he has a truthful word to say. And when he doesn’t? Then, like a jackal, I will lunge, waving a screen full of information about medical school timelines. I am surprised by how difficult it is to find irrefutable proof of deception. After months of suspicion, this July commencement fact is the only hard evidence—besides the driver’s license incident—that I have found. I’m not particularly interested in having this talk with Noah. It seems pointless, and I despise conversations whose only purpose is vindication, even if it is my own. But Noah insists. When I refuse to allow him inside my apartment, we agree to meet the next afternoon. He hands me the flowers. When he tries to kiss me, I flinch. The next morning, a text. Unfortunately, Noah cannot see me as planned. His cousin’s dog has died. And this dog, he meant a lot to the cousin. And this cousin is the son of the insane dead aunt. So one can only imagine the emotions. Noah’s mother is driving from Red Deer right this minute to pick him up and take him north, so the family can grieve together. I laugh aloud as I read this tripe, heartsick and insulted. This text, I think, is the best you can do?
I never hear from Noah again. In the fall, a poet friend is offered a post as Writer-in-Residence at the Cumming School of Medicine. By chance has he seen Noah? At a speaking event, in the hospital halls? Despite everything, I can’t stop thinking that I’ve made a mistake, that Noah really is who he claimed to be, that I really am so flawed and deranged as to have, once again, created false problems to forever distance myself from love. That old masochistic impulse to ruin every good thing. And there were many good things about Noah. He listened when I spoke, which sounds common enough but is rare. We laughed all the time. We rode bikes and read books together. Like teenagers, we got too stoned and whispered about aliens, incels, the dark web, and the heaviness of the world. Noah is so smart that, like a character in a Conrad novel, his friends call him The Professor. He has long eyelashes and always smells like clean laundry. When asleep, Noah looks so harmless and fragile that I would often lay awake beside him, disturbed by the day’s contradictions and throbbing with a feeling that to protect him I would do anything.
“Cancel your credit cards,” says my mother.Our dog Kipling—the car-struck terrier—was named by my sister after Rudyard of The Jungle Book fame. Victorian in period and impulse, Rudyard Kipling’s animal stories are densely moralistic. And while the genre seems apt to an era known for its strict moral codes and didactic artistic preferences, the beast fable has a history as old as literature itself. Almost everyone is familiar with the Classical fables attributed to Aesop—the Tortoise and the Hare of slow and steady, the Fox of sour grapes. Chaucer’s “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” features the ribald hen Pertelot, her metaphysical philosopher husband Chauntecleer, and the sly fox Duan Russell. An analog of Chaucer’s wily aristocrat, Reynard the Fox appears frequently in a cycle of medieval French allegories, Roman de Reynart. George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and, in Canadian letters, André Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs, and Yann Martel’s terrible holocaust allegory Beatrice and Virgil are three modern examples. Often allegorical, the beast fable is didactic in mode. Most of us know the formula: animal trope as metaphor for the folly or virtue of human nature. Close kin to the fabular, the term “catfishing” has an apocryphal etymology—global-capitalist fishing practice turned Christian parable. According to lore of albeit questionable veracity, a catfish is placed in a live well with another species, cod for instance. The cruel, nipping catfish keep the cod from becoming stagnant and lazy on their way to market. In pastor Charles Swindoll’s 1988 Come Before Winter and Share My Hope, fishing lore becomes metaphor for the human soul. “Each one of us is in a tank of particular and inescapable circumstances,” writes Swindoll. “It is painful enough to stay in the tank. But in addition to our situation, there are God-appointed ‘catfish’ to bring sufficient tension that keeps us alive, alert, fresh, and growing.” To me, this sounds suspiciously like a Chicken Soup for the Soul aphorism of the if-life-gives-you-lemons variety. And I want neither chicken soup nor lemonade. What I want is blood: a rabbit’s foot charm, gleaming with gore and muscle. Perhaps, since I am prone to make a gospel of self-pity, the charm would serve as a reminder that you can’t fault a cat for being a cat. Though I am tired of forgiveness as metaphor. My encyclopedia tells me that the catfish is named for its whisker-like barbels or “fleshy feelers.” Found worldwide, these bottom-dwelling scavengers feed on any kind of plant or animal matter. Species range from four centimetres to four-and-a-half meters long and may weigh up to 300 kilograms. Smaller species are popular aquarium fish; the larger are often used for food.
To be clear, Noah wasn’t a true catfish. At least not in the 2014 addition to the Merriam-Webster sense of “a person who sets up a false personal profile on a social networking site for fraudulent or deceptive purposes.” I knew him in person. I knew his real name, where he lived. I knew his friends. But he fabricated all manner of details about his life. I doubt much of what he told me was true. Funnily enough, Noah shunned social media—perhaps because it’s easier to lie in person when what you’ve said can’t be easily confirmed online. The proliferating documentaries, radio programs, and articles about catfishing use words like “epidemic.” Admitted catfish cite unpleasant psychic states—loneliness, self-loathing, and low self-esteem—to explain their predatory behaviour. Rather than money, some report a desire for intimacy, absent in their real lives. And perhaps, to a certain logic, a wholesale falseness is only an exaggerated form of the current state of relations—the 300-kilogram variety of a species that includes all manner of digital personae.
What then to make of our new and strange lives, where the average among us spends 24 hours online in a week? What to make of the widespread impulse to document every lived moment as evidence of what any number of bicep-kissing Tinder hopefuls might call “living life to the fullest.” In an age where it seems like the most important of daily activities is the feeding of an inflated and largely false version of oneself, perhaps the prevalence of the catfish is no one’s fault—or everyone’s.My sister returns from Australia for Christmas. Once, at a concert, Noah and I ran into an old friend of hers. Seeing Noah, Janine appeared to be thrilled. So, when I asked later how he knew her, and Noah said they’d dated, I was pleased. No former girlfriend in possession of a right mind would be so happy to see a malicious, deceptive Noah. “I don’t know if I should tell you this,” my sister announces in my living room. She’s just dined with friends of the aforementioned old friend. She lounges in an armchair next to the houseplant I’ve decorated as a Christmas tree. She parrots the phrase “pathological liar.” Even now, months later, my heart jumps. “Everyone was shocked,” she says, “when I told them he claimed to be in medical school.” I stare out the window at a snow hare on the lawn. “He told Janine he was a lawyer.” “Really?” I say, my voice flat. “Janine thought she was going crazy.” My sister pauses. “They dated for two years. Her father had to get involved,” she says gravely. “What does that even mean?” I ask. My sister only shrugs. “Why then,” I demand, “would she have been so happy to see him?” “That’s what I said,” my sister replies. “For years?” I say, relieved. I see now that there are two rabbits hunched together in the snow. My sister, newly enamoured with Canadian wildlife, throws open the window to take a photo. “Remember Maurice?” she says, scrolling through her pictures. “I love Maurice,” I say. “With those baby bunnies? Remember how you wanted to keep that severed foot?” “I ought to have been allowed!” I say. “My life would surely have turned out better.” Then we are laughing. And for a moment the world melts in a blur of sound and light.
