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all that time I’d thought it was just the two of us.
    WHEN THE SOUL leaves your body, you’ll know. It was 8:27 on a Monday morning. The question, in a voice that gave me goosebumps: “After years of playing in the same configuration, why did Jerry and Phil one day decide to swap positions on stage?” I stammered, tried to cover it up with some good-natured banter, but the answer wouldn’t come. I entered Laureen’s room. Just as I expected, she was sitting up in bed with the radio off and the phone to her ear. I got down on my knees, pleading silently for the answer, but she just sat there with a crooked smile on her face, fat and happy. Her arms were folded across her chest, her mouth was tight, button-shaped.
    While the station played all kinds of sound effects to mark the end of an era—applause, the opening of a vault, bottle rockets—I heard my own sound effects, a fizzle like one of those vitamin C tablets dissolving in water, then a small explosion, a pop really, a smell like a burnt raisin and a thin tuft of smoke. There goes my soul, I thought. I was no longer my own person. How does that proverb go? I was a man dreaming I was a dream dreamed by Laureen. I have to admit, down there, with the other parasitic life forms, out from under the burden of desire and free will—hunt and kill, catch and drag, the whole splashing and tugging mess of it—there was serenity.
    SUMMER CAME ON hard, the hottest one on record. Rooftops sprung barbecues and the smell of roasting meat wafted in our windows day and night. Desperate for a tan, Laureen spent her days lying out in the full sun of our deck. Watching her struggle to turn over one day I decided, enough with retaliation. I would play the good husband. I would kill her with kindness, if that’s what it took. From then on I oiled and flipped her at regular intervals. She turned the colour of tea with milk—slight freckling on her nose, arms, shoulders. Then amber ale—so many freckles it was difficult to see between them. Then the rich brown of a chestnut—freckles joining together—until, eventually, she was just one big, leathery freckle. Every night I propped her limbs, moisturizing and admiring her skin: the way it radiated the heat of the sun late into the night, salty lines running down her back like ocean currents seen from a plane, a million tiny wrinkles fanning out at each joint.
    Every once in a while I’d taunt her—“If Jer-een wants a drink, she’d better fess up about that miracle”—but otherwise I was the perfect husband.
    I EVENTUALLY GOT it out of her. It happened at a show in ’86. Jerry’d just returned to the stage after coming out of a coma and the band was having a bad run. This show was no different. Jerry was forgetting words, fat, clumsy fingers on the guitar as though he was half sunk, pushing against water. Not only that, he seemed resentful, as if he blamed the audience for all that had happened to him.
    Halfway through the set, Laureen, a teenager by this point, split off from the group. She’d been waiting in the Porta-Potty line but, giving up on that, had managed to find a narrow opening below the stage. While she was peeing all over the fat wires in that dark underworld, Jerry stormed away in the middle of the set. Laureen was still bent double, struggling to pull up her pants when someone lifted a panel in the floor and climbed down. She caught a brief glimpse of the man before he closed the panel; he was burly, really packed into his skin with curly hairs rising off every part of him. She heard him grunt and lie down at her feet, exactly where she’d just peed. He smelled of sweat and vinegar and he vibrated with tension. “Fuckin’ bullshit, man,” he said. “Can’t fuckin’ get ’em off.” While the rest of the band struggled on above, Laureen did the only thing she thought she could; she leaned close to tell