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within Baddeley’s soul the admiration he’d felt for Avery Andrews guttered but was not extinguished.



It had been a brief episode, nothing more than two (admittedly strange) days.
    For as long as he was able, for months, Baddeley tried to suppress the memory, as one tries to suppress the memory of a woman one has loved and broken with in some humiliating way. And like the memory of a lost beloved, his encounters with Avery Andrews recurred to him at unexpected times, bringing confusion, anguish, and longing. Baddeley struggled to understand what had happened to him, and finally began to understand it in his own way. What had he done? He had sought out a poet whose work he’d long admired. He had found the man. And then? And then he had become the victim of an inexplicable and pointless hoax, brought to a ward in Toronto Western to interact with a life-sized puppet. After which, Andrews had pleaded for death.
    There was neither sanctity nor mystery behind any of that. There was only a madness whose consequence was that Baddeley could no longer look at the books of Avery Andrews without a feeling of humiliation. (He did not, for all that, throw them out.)
    A year passed — a year of fitful forgetting.
    Although Baddeley sometimes managed to convince himself that he’d lived through a hoax, something inside of him had truly changed after the encounters at Toronto Western: his attitude, his sensibility, his understanding. Something had changed and deeply. His approach to literature — and so, to life — had shifted without him being conscious of the shifting. However false the apparition may have been, the experience of it had real consequences. Baddeley had participated in the creation of a poem. He had been only a few paces away from where lightning had struck and some of the charged particles had rearranged something in him.
    This understanding — this rearrangement — influenced his reviews and, at the same time, poisoned reviewing for him. Even as he wrote his opinions — which were now perceptive, conscientious, and even, at times, brilliant — Baddeley knew his ability for what it was: trivial. The books he judged to be mediocre were not, objectively speaking, mediocre. They were “mediocre” because Baddeley could now clearly and resonantly reveal the particular angle (his own) from which they were “mediocre.” That is, he could vividly express the fixity of his angle on things.
    That this was all the ability any good reviewer has ever possessed did not console him.
    Worse: as his reputation grew, as he was invited to write for better journals and papers, for American and British venues where a host of well-known critics plied their unvalued trade, he grew tired of his limitations. He grew weary, in other words, of his own perspective.
    More: his disappointment deepened the chasm between himself and a world he’d once wished to inhabit — literary Toronto, with its endless book launches and poetry readings and literary festivals run by men whose only talent was, in essence, the ability to read. Here, the mid-listers trying desperately to keep afloat, networking, networking, networking; there, the poets just this side of insane nursing their childhood grudges. Here, the stars in the literary firmament (big teeth, pink palms, regal airs); there, the fresh-faced youth, trying their best not to seem overwhelmed or overjoyed or overawed. All their names began to lose sense: Onwood, Munwood, Mistwood ... Why, he wondered, had he ever wished to belong to such a cloud-cuckoo world?
    Whereas, previously, he’d been kept from literary society by his envy and want of self-confidence, Baddeley was now driven from it by a certainty that the society of writers was almost infinitely less interesting than intercourse with books, books in which he could, at times, feel the presence he’d felt at the Toronto Western with Andrews. So, while the esteem in which