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down the dirt driveway toward the boy.
    â€œIs this your cat?” I asked. “He looks like his name should be Marmalade.”
    No answer. His parents had wisely taught him not to speak to people he didn’t know.
    The cat meowed at me and brushed up against my legs. The front door of the house opened and a woman poked her head out.
    â€œSo long, then, Spider-Man,” I said and walked on. The boy followed me for a ways on his bicycle, and I heard the woman calling for him to come back.
    I made my way to the Walmart where I’d left my car, and I went inside and bought a houseplant, which I placed in the kitchen window when I got home. I listened to the phone messages and learned that Ian was not coming home for dinner. I didn’t bother cooking anything. I didn’t feel hungry.
    At dusk, I got in my car once more and drove up the block where I’d lived with a Greek family when I first came to university, and then several blocks over to the street where I had lived with a boy named Rudy. The house was gone, torn down and replaced. The owners had tried to make the new one fit into the neighbourhood, but it stood out with its faux brick facing and its ostentatious columns on either side of the front door. The house across the street, where an evolving stream of art students had lived, was still there, but it was rundown and I supposed that in no time, the whole block would be developed with infill houses. Student housing in these neighbourhoods was no longer needed. The university now had many residence buildings on campus.
    As the city settled into darkness, I found myself on a street near the hospital where the homeless man had died. I pulled into the parking lot by the emergency entrance and there it was, the makeshift memorial, up against a fence. A bored-looking security guard stood nearby with his hands in his pockets. A few candles in glass containers had been placed in front of a framed picture of the dead man. Perhaps the security guard was there to prevent a fire. There seemed to be no other reason for his presence, since there were no mourners or spectators that I could see.
    As I stopped my car to look, he came to my window and motioned for me to lower it.
    â€œHave a look and move along,” he said. “This is still the emergency entrance.”
    â€œIt’s touching,” I said to him. “The memorial.”
    â€œThey’re tearing it down tomorrow. Have a look and move along.”
    And so I did. I drove slowly by the fence and saw the dead man’s face flickering in the candlelight. He had a pleasant face, at least in that photo.
    I left the parking lot and joined a line of traffic that took me through downtown and to an area known as the warehouse district, where the clubs were. I had never been in one, and I had no desire to go in now because I could hear the pounding techno dance music even as I passed by in the car.
    I came upon a junkyard, well lit to prevent theft, although I wasn’t sure who would want to break into a junkyard. I could see the outline of rusty piles of scrap metal through the chain-link fence. Another pile of nothing but bathtubs. Two German shepherd dogs on patrol sniffed the periphery of the fence, bored by the lack of action. What was the real business of a junkyard with dogs? I wondered. A front for drugs, one of my colleagues at work would always say whenever a questionable licence application came to the attention of city hall. I did a U-turn so I was on the same side of the street as the dogs, and I pulled up to the curb and rolled down my window. The dogs stopped and looked at me, alert now, and went back to sniffing their way along the fenceline only when I put the car in gear and moved off down the street.
    As I turned back toward the city centre, I checked the time. It was almost midnight. I’d had nothing to eat since thehot dog in the Safeway parking lot, and I was now hungry. I wondered if Ian would be home yet. I