Toby Read Online Free PDF Page A

for five minutes, please.” She stood under a shower head, a razor in her hand, one foot on a white plastic bench. Water cascaded off her black hair. “Please?”
    “You want me to leave?”
    She looked up into the water. “We’ll talk tonight, when your drugs wear off.”
    Toby closed the shower door and changed into his suit. He began to preen, but the look of himself, in the mirror, was unbearable.
    The front door was unlatched, though Toby was certain he had locked it. The morning was sunny and warm, typically windy. Two blond girls in uniforms passed with their father, who wore a camel-hair overcoat. He had time, the father. He had been born into timelessness. His children were lovely and his shoes were well polished. Toby greeted them as they passed, and stood next to his black car, recalling the white Lexus SUV that had been parked in front of him a few hours before. A miniature tornado blew a mass of leaves and a potato chip bag down Strathcona Avenue; it stopped and settled before him, as though ashamed.

Two
    To distract himself, Toby opened the passenger window a crack and turned up the music, a satellite channel specializing in edgy but not too edgy pop. This was what every smart commodity, cultural or otherwise, strove to be in the ascendance of his generation: edgy but not too edgy. Revolution light. It was the sound of The Man smashing himself with a hollow plastic mallet.
    The city and its fading graffiti of despair, all that he had seen before and dismissed, clawed at him. Dirty white steeples peeked up from the crusted neighbourhoods south of downtown, vainly now in the continent’s most statistically godless major city. Warehouses and factories of an economy that had gone trite, home to pigeons and the schizophrenic.
    He had come to believe that the white Lexus SUV parked in front of him on Strathcona Avenue at five thirty in the morning had been Dwayne’s. In the underground parking lot, south of René Lévesque, Toby inspected the vehicle to be sure. He was tempted to ascribe his suspicions to a cocktail of shock and guilt and NyQuil and sleeplessness,to a manufactured paranoia that would seem ridiculous in the arc lamp of sobriety. But the scenario fit, from Dwayne’s line of questioning in the bistro to the state of Alicia’s bedclothes. He sat on the rear bumper of the station manager’s Lexus until the garage door opened. A Honda Civic passed, a production assistant waved. She opened her window. “Big day!” she said. “Hey?”
    Toby drew upon all his strength and managed a thumbs-up.
    He had twenty minutes before he was set to leave, with Bruce the cameraman, to interview the Conservative candidate in the riding of Westmount-Ville-Marie. Instead of researching the hopeless candidate and his curriculum vitae, Toby hunted for Dwayne in the offices and corridors of the station, which occupied three floors of a brutalist structure in the southeast corner of downtown. Every fluorescent light had been removed from the hall of anchors. The pimple-, scar-, and wrinkle-revealing tendencies of the cheap tubes made them a grave danger to newsreaders, who share one essential and essentially dangerous trait: equal parts self-love and self-disgust. The walls were decorated with inspirational poems— If I have faltered more or less / In my great task of happiness —and faded colour photographs of sunsets, sporting victories, lone wolves, and tall poppies. Dwayne’s corner office, at the end of the hall of anchors, was empty. It was inhabited by his collection of African art and a fresh dose of his musky cologne. From his small stereo system, Marvin Gaye. The blinds were pulled down and the room was lit, tastefully, with a couple of antique lamps. Nausea swept through Toby. He had to eat.
    “Mushinsky.”
    Toby turned slowly. His hands quivered and he was certain that if he spoke his voice would be worse. His lips were electric.
    “You ready?” Dwayne carried a muffin and a giant coffee. “A real