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turned to darkness
     like your own dim soul.
    I cursed him to his face and told him that the day would come when all my
     power would surface from below. I shall bring up from the abyss the echoes of rodent and
     insect screams to shatter the drums of your ears! I told him. Andthen you won’t need to cut trees to carve music boxes, and no wire will be
     stretched, tuned, or picked, and all melody will come from the core of the beings whose
     instruments are innate inside them — insect legs making tunes as fine as violins,
     rodent teeth more potent than all your percussion, millions of creatures in sync,
     orchestrated, marching to claim what is rightly theirs . . .
    Reza laughed at me and walked away, humming. I knew it, he said. You are a
     lunatic. I always knew it — a loonnneyyyy.
    FINALLY, I REACHED Matild again, Reza’s housemate, the
     beauty who still works at the French restaurant where I used to work. Lately I find the
     city is being invaded by whining Parisians like Matild, who chant the
     “Marseillaise” every chance they get. They come to this Québécois
     American North and occupy every
boulangerie
, conquer every French restaurant
     and
croissanterie
with their air of indifference and their scent of fermented
     cheese — although, truly, one must admire their inherited knowledge of wine and
     culture. These are skills to be secretly admired. Indeed, the Parisians are highly
     sought after and desired by the Quebec government. Photos of
la campagne rustique,
     le Québec du nord des Amériques
, depicting cozy snowy winters and
     smoking chimneys, are pasted on every travel agent’s door; big baby-seal eyes
     blink from the walls of immigration offices, waiting to be saved, nursed, and petted;
     the multicolours of Indian summers are plastered across every travel magazine; and
le nouveau monde français
is discovered on every travel show. The
     Québécois,with their extremely low birth rate, think they
     can increase their own breed by attracting the Parisians, or at least for a while
     balance the number of their own kind against the herd of brownies and darkies coming
     from every old French colony, on the run from dictators and crumbling cities. But what
     is the use, really? Those Frenchies come here, and like the Québécois they do
     not give birth. They abstain, or they block every Fallopian tube and catch every sperm
     before the egg sizzles into
canard à l’orange
. They are too busy
     baking, tasting wine, and cutting ham and cheese, too occupied intimidating American
     visitors who play the sophisticates by tasting and nodding at every bottle of French
     wine wrapped in a white cloth.
    When I worked as a dishwasher in the French restaurant, I heard the
     Frenchies laughing behind swinging kitchen doors, making fun of the cowboys who gave a
     compliment to the chef with every bite and hummed approvingly at antibiotic-laced
     hormone-injected cows ruminating ground chicken bones, all the while quietly starving
     from the small portions and becoming disoriented by the potions of those French Druids.
     It was Matild who got me the job. And so, for a whole year I splashed water on dishes
     and silverware. Sometimes when I picked up a spoon or a fork, I swear I could still feel
     the warmth of a customer’s lips. By the shape of the food residue, I could tell if
     the customer had tightened her lips on the last piece of cake. I would take off my
     gloves and pass my thumb across the exit lines of a woman’s lips. When she is
     happy, delighted with the food, a woman will slowly pull the spoon from her tightened
     mouth and let ithang a while in front of her lips, breathe over it,
     and shift it slightly to catch the candlelight’s reflection. It saddened me to
     erase happiness with water. It saddened me to drown sighs and sparkles with hoses. And
     then it saddened me to bring back the shine and the glitter.
    One day, I was promoted