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Hello, I'm Jubelas.

Since you haven't heard from me for a while you've prob- ably been wondering what's been happening, or maybe not. Well, it's like this. We are the beekeepers, Omphale and me. After Noman died on us - and I know he didn't really, what do you take me for, an idiot? - Omph and me decided to make our dream come true, so we left the city and got ourselves an apiary and started raising bees. That was thirteen years ago. Most people don't know anything about bees. You have to see them up close, you have to live with them to start to love them, you have to watch all those golden little buggers swarming over your sleeves - then something snaps inside you and it's like a moment of truth. What with me and Omph and the bees and the Great Outdoors, the world is fine, just fine.

At least I think it's fine. See, he came back a while ago. Kali phoned and said he's back and would we like to go out, a foursome, like before, because we knew he never really died, didn't we, it was all a joke, ha ha ha. I said OK, but that word foursome sounded to me like a Roman phalanx - that's like a human square that marches along with shields raised and spears sticking out, ready to take on the world - anyway, we went over to her place and drank tall skinny fruit drinks that twinkled with ice and we all sat around twiddling our thumbs and then he walks in and says in that whisper that wasn't a whisper 'Jubelas, Omphale, hello. Where did you get those funny names?' I started to say that it was him who gave us those names, but Kali gave me a look. She had warned us that he'd had some kind of accident and lost his memory - (I thought it must be wild to have no past) - so he wasn't playing with a full deck (was he ever?) and we shouldn't talk about the past, especially about that awful joke when he pretended to die but didn't, which of course I knew all along. He came forward and shook our hands, very formal - he always was formal - but behind the formal part was the wild part and I could still feel it there in his handshake, in his eyes.

'Kali tells me you raise bees,' he says, as though this was a crime, so I was immediately fighting for my life.

'There's nothing wrong with raising bees,' I says.

'God no,' he says. 'I like bees. Although I have never really known a bee, so to speak, or seen one up close. But I seem to recall reading something about bees. Ah - bees are like elephants, that was it.'

I waited. This was him all right.

' - In that they are both lunar animals, and therefore symbols of heaven. And the interesting thing is that if the lunar animal is large, its voice is high-pitched, as it is with the elephant, and if it is small like the bee, then it is low-pitched.'

'You don't say,' I says.

'Yes. And the opposite is of course true of earth-symbol animals .'

'Could I have another drink,' says Omph.

Kali said she thought bees slept all winter frozen in a kind of suspended animation and then sort of thawed out in the spring. I told her it wasn't like that at all, then I explained what really happened.

'You don't say,' he says.

We all sat around blinking and twitching in this frenzy of boredom. I said did he hear about the weatherman's strike which means we'll have no weather. He said Maurice Materlinck and Edmund Hillary's father were both apiarists. I decided it was time for some jokes because I myself am a jokemaker, which is very rare. I started the one about Lawrence of Newfoundland which is now very famous and I am working on a whole batch of Cyclops jokes - like the Cyclops pirate with an eyepatch in the middle of his forehead (Noman thought I said psychic pirate, he never had any sense of humour) - and a new one is the dentist who went to Venice and came back and decorated his office with pictures of bridges and root canals. ('I like that one,' he says, and I knew he didn't.) 'I bet you wonder where all the great jokes come from,' I says. 'Most of the time you just hear jokes, you never think of who made them up - people like me, people who work alone and unacclaimed, people who take the art of joking seriously, people who are forever thinking up bigger and better puns, smarter and smarter witticisms. And then maybe once in a lifetime one of them really catches on, and Bam - you've got a hit. ('Have you ever had a hit, Jube?' he asks in that loud whisper that scares me so much. Well if he didn't know, I wasn't going to tell him.) Then I said that sometimes another guy somewhere in the world thinks up the same joke as you do and he gets all the credit for it - like what happened to Darwin and that guy in the States both thinking up Evolution at the same time, both just stumbling on the same idea. There was a silence after that so I started taking big crazy words that nobody knew and sprinkling them like salt and pepper all over the place - big fat juicy words like bucolic and chthonian and Babylonian and polymorphic. 'It's so soporific it's almost remittent,' he says, but that sounded like his normal speech. 'Let's go out.'

So we ended up on the lakeshore at Sunnyside Beach. Omph and I wanted to go swimming in the big pool there but he said there were a hundred kids in it all peeing at once, so we took our beach stuff and sat on the sand. He went to the edge of the water and stood there a long time staring out over the lake. There were dead fish and all kinds of sickening things floating in the shallows. 'What is there in the lake powerful enough to kill them?' he says and came back to sit with us. 'What did they feel when the waves thrust them up, dying, onto the beaches of Kanada?' This is how he talks. 'There are three kinds of sandwiches,' says Omph, laying out little hermetically sealed squares. 'Ham and cheese on brown, salami on rye and peanut butter and jam on white.' 'Positively Sumerian,' I says. 'Absolutely bubonic, if you ask me. Has anybody heard of the United States of Kanada?' We started to eat and then right out of the blue he says, 'I'm going to swim the lake. Next August.'

'Oh don't swim in there, it's full of dead fish. Ugh,' says Omph.

'I don't mean swim in it, I mean swim it. Swim the lake,' he says.

Well it goes without saying we were really stunned, but I kept cool and said it was a free country and he could do what he liked. 'There's nothing worse than freedom. It's excruciating,' he says. 'It demands a terrible discipline of its own.' Christ. Then he asked me what were all the things I wore around my neck, and he stared at my lucky charms - the crab, the crucifix, the Star of David, the wiggly thing, the blue plastic eye (I'm taking no chances) - and then can you believe it he grabs it all in his hand and wrenches it off my neck, breaking the chain and everything. 'I hate symbols,' he says, talking in italics like he sometimes does. I'm telling you I freaked out, I screamed what did he think he was doing, he'd pay for this, and so on like I was crazy, which temporarily I was. 'Aurum nostrum non est aurum vulgi,' he says. You're wondering how I can spell that. 'Quit talking in some goddamn foreign tongue!' I scream. 'I just meant it's real gold,' he says. 'I know it's godamn real gold,' I says. 'OK, I'm sorry, I'll get it fixed,' he says' cool as Hell. 'Go jump in the lake,' I says, and he just glared at me, just glared.

Then he stared at the lake as though he expected it to produce a tidal wave or cough up some monster on the shore. 'Turn a map of the world upside down,' he says, 'and you realize that too is the world. Kanada is down there.' The air was getting all crackly like it was full of static, and the light was this weird electric green. With him it's always like the hour before a thunderstorm, but the storm never comes.

'You're absolutely multi-linear, Noman,' I says.

'I know,' he says.

Jesus Christ.

We went walking along to this big pavilion that used to be the changing room for swimmers back in the olden days. We walked around the walls to the front where there was a kind of Byzantine arch with gold and red and blue fish and fancy letters saying SUNNYSIDE BATHS. Omph said it was like a castle and she could see Medieval ladies walking along the upper galleries with their long purple veils flowing in the wind. Kali said it was an Eastern palace filled with dark musicians and dancers. Noman said it was one of the places that would be like a marker when he was coming in to the end of the lake swim. Omph got very upset and said he couldn't possibly be serious about the swim, it was suicide - but one look at his face told her that he was. Then we rode around past the Kanadian National Exhibition grounds and saw this big old cannon left over from somebody's war looming up on the opposite side of the road, and a sick rusty old plane beside it poised for take-off into nowhere. 'Which war are these things from?' says Omph. 'There's only one war,' he says. 'It's all in the past,' says Omph. 'Whose past?' he says. 'Our past,' I says. 'I don't like the past, I hate the past,' he says. 'There's not much past in this country,' I says. 'Maybe we should hang onto what little of it we've got.' 'What's so big about the past?' Kali cries. 'What's so great about the past? Why's everybody in love with the past?' And so on. I looked at the miserable hunks of metal, rat-grey in the moonlight, and said I didn't really think there was anything so great about the past after all and I didn't dwell on it myself. The past is over and done with and there's nothing to be gained from dwelling on it, that's what I said. 'I figure it this way - history marches forward and time waits for no man.' Silence fell with a thud and he just glared at me, just glared. 'It's no good harping on it,' I says. 'No good at all. And I mean that sleevelessly.' 'Really,' he says, and turns away. 'How amazing that none of you realizes that there is no such thing as history, that time is circular, and all events are synchronous points on the circumference.'

Back at Kali's place he stood staring at the fish in the aquarium like they were all plotting something together, all making these secret silent plans, him and the fish, their brilliant devious little minds in perfect harmony. Kali made martinis and I proposed a toast in one of the 23 languages I can propose toasts in, then somebody put on a record of flamenco music and Noman took everything off the polished coffee table and got up on it and started clapping and making those crisp staccato sounds with his heels. Then he took a flying leap off the table and knocked over the Bromeliade plant, smashing the pot to smithereens and sending hunks of black earth all over the carpet. The plant lay there battered and broken and in shock, and then it died, giving up little green gasps with its ghost, at least that's what I heard. I looked over to the aquarium because I had this feeling, and sure enough, some of the fish had fainted or were playing dead with their white sides turned up. Kali says 'Next year I'm going to India.' Nobody paid any attention, we were looking at him, he was turning the world upside down just like before, and then I knew the old madness had begun again. Where I lose myself and end up somewhere inside his head.

So just like before, Omph and I spent hours trying to figure out who he really was and what his nationality was - Russian or Spanish or Greek or Albanian or Arab or Hungarian or Gypsy or who knows maybe even French-Kanadian which is about as foreign as you can get. (When the Indians said White Man Speak With Forked Tongue they meant the white man was bilingual, that's how I figure it.) But he didn't speak French, because once I tried the back of a label of Libby's tomato juice on him and he didn't bat an eyelid. And he didn't act like any of the foreigners did - the Italians going on and on about some problem from ancient Rome, the Greeks going on and on although they had solved it but couldn't stand to give it up, the Arabs accusing each other of accusing each other, the Portuguese screaming at each other for existing, the Chinese laughing at nothing, the Hungarians eating a lot of red and yellow peppers and discussing books. The hundred and eighty-nine Solitudes.

I knew it was only a matter of time before he came up with some crazy idea or another, so I wasn't surprised when he phoned me up. 'Jube,' he says, 'help me, I'm looking for King.'

'Which King?' I says, humouring him.

'Mackenzie King. I saw him in a dream last night. Short fat little man with a brown suit and little dog. I said: you can't be a ghost, I don't believe in you. He said: Don't you think this country is old enough to be haunted! Don't you think I'm important enough to be a ghost! Come and find me, I'll tell you everything, I'll show you how to survive here. He has the answer,' he says, and I had to stop myself from asking what is the question. But I didn't laugh at him and I didn't feel sorry for him either. You don't feel sorry for Noman.

What happens next is crazy. We go to Honest Ed's because he says he's seen the king (that's what I call him) outside of the place two mornings in a row. Honest Ed's is this huge crazy bargain store where little old Chinese ladies line up for hours to be the first in and then go surging up and down the creaky old stairs and milling around the counters like bees in a giant beehive. The place is a Tower of Babel, it's awful, we're probably the only English-speaking people there, suddenly I know what it feels like to be in a minority. The doors open and this delicious murmur goes through the crowd and everybody pours in. We all grab grimy plastic shopping bags then go down the old corridor leading to the first floor. Italian and Portuguese women with fierce eyebrows swarm around the paper flowers and pictures made of corrugated plastic that change from Jesus to Mary as you walk by. I think I'll buy a calendar because I like to look forward to the future so I go looking for one and get all screwed up in the kitchenware department with red and blue Yugoslavian pots, iron frying pans, ashtrays with maple leaves on them, skewers, skillets, strainers, broilers, basters, steamers, poachers and things that slice hard boiled eggs. Babies are screaming all around me, all having their teeny little nightmares. I want a calendar, I tell myself, just a calendar. Egg-separators, beer mugs, toasters, toothpicks, towels, the world is full of things. Meanwhile I see Noman heading for the second floor, the people making way on either side of him like he's parting the Red Sea - how does he do that? - so I follow him and two Indian ladies in turquoise saris carrying TV stools collide with me and glare at me from the third eyes on their foreheads and babble and squeal in Hindi. On the second floor there are masses of women pulling blouses and sweaters out of shape and right in the middle of them there's Noman, perfectly still, looking straight ahead at something only he can see, I sure as Hell can't see anything except chaos, then he starts elbowing his way through the crowds and it's obvious he's on the trail of the king. So this wild pursuit begins, him after his man and me after him. He hits the stairway with me right behind and starts down at top speed and crashes into this Indian guy carrying a stuffed snake which slides half way down the stairs, and then we're back on the first floor and I see him crashing into the counters and things falling all over the place - bargain bread and bargain herring in tomato sauce and bargain beans and hairspray and shampoo and Maalox and Noxzema and typing paper and sample testers of cologne and sunglasses and deodorant and jars of peanuts. I hear somebody say, 'Foreigners, they get worse all the time,' and then I see Noman has pushed his way through the line-up at the checkout counter and is heading for the exit when one of Honest Ed's guards grabs him from behind and stops him dead.

'What do you think you're doing?' he says.

'I'm after him. The short fat little man with the brown suit and the little dog.'

'No dogs in here,' he says. 'You're seeing things.' Then he takes us into the main office where we find out we have to pay for everything that got broken, and because I am big hearted and very stupid and because I know Noman doesn't have much money, I pay for it myself.

When we get outside people are walking around in the rain with their plastic icons and their umbrellas like old black halos. I was depressed, I hated them all, screw them all. Being with Noman makes you more alone that you've ever been because everything bounces off of him, and you yourself bounce off of him like he's a mirror and all he's there for is to throw you back on yourself. He can do anything he wants, he isn't the one who suffers. When you're with him you're on your own. He gets off scot free and leaves your brain looking like the first floor of Honest Ed's. 'I hope you drown in the goddamn lake,' I says. 'I'll pay you back,' he says. We start to walk away. 'That place is like the past,' he says, 'full of crazies, crammed with a cast of thousands.' 'It's because it's full of foreigners,' I says. 'If they were all Kanadians in there it'd be different.' Then he says something funny, he says, 'Do you know why Kanadians are so friendly and shy and polite, so afraid to step over each other? It's because they're the loneliest people in the world.'

I bought two bags of nuts from the nut vendor. Then I tried to convince him that the short fat little man he saw might have been Angelo Lucifori who owns a vegetable store a block or so away, so I took him there and pointed to Angelo and asked him if this was the guy he was running after. He says of course not, and anyway he didn't have a dog. 'I told you I was looking for "the king," says Noman, 'and you were no help, Jube, no help at all.' I noticed that he had started to say, 'the king' like I did - somehow it made more sense that way. Then he says the damndest thing, he says, 'Jube, I can see you're not interested in alternative realities.' I said No, and I didn't like modern art either. Then we bought fruit from Angelo and left.

There were other horrible times like the time he dragged me down to the midway at the Exhibition and we stood gawking at the magicians and snake-dancers and the escape artist whose whole body was this mass of gleaming chains, and everything was red and yellow, even the music was red and yellow, and the smell of sweat and mustard and candy floss made you reel. And there was this kid - this I couldn't understand - this kid who kept following us around, a weird little brat who was there every time you turned around, who was there on top of the ferris wheel waving his arms like crazy and laughing. And he was there again when we went up to Casa Loma, his head popping out from behind the huge stones. He started screaming at Noman and calling him names even I hadn't heard and then Noman went after him round and round the walls and I stood there watching them both and wondering if anything would ever be sane and normal again. If he wasn't chasing the king, he was chasing the kid - or was the kid chasing him? - and as far as I know, nobody ever caught up with anybody.

He had me following him all over the city looking for the king in subway stations and restaurants and even a meeting of a mystical society. WHO IS THE BEAST? said the sign. LET NOTHING PREVENT YOU FROM HEARING THIS DARING DISCLOSURE. He even dragged me to the goddamn Tom Thomson Hall and swore that the first violinist in the orchestra was actually the king, staring at his bow like he hated it, then drawing it over a string to make this note that all the other violins copied until the whole place was a solid wall of A Major. Then the sound went soaring up to the gods, dragging us up with it like we were puppets on strings, and I waited for the silence to come so I could cough into it like casting a stone into a pool and making rings around it, only this made rings of sound and everybody else coughed too so the place became one big lung. Then the music started and halfway through Noman says, 'I hate this stupid concert and I'm getting out.' 'This concert stinks,' I says, and we pushed our way through the fur coats and the knees into the aisle. 'Excuse us, but the first violinist is abominably off key,' says Noman to everyone. And outside he says to me, 'Do you know that violinists eventually go mad? It's from hearing the vibrations on the E string year after year. I myself am a violinist.'

Naturally. What else.

You're wondering why I put up with all this. Sure, I wanted to escape from him, but when he's not a mirror he's a Black Hole. His mind is a Black Hole and nothing escapes a Black Hole, not even light. The gravity inside is so strong that no known form of energy can break its grip. It's a one way trap in time and space. That's what I read somewhere. So I was inside his mind, a prisoner. I was walking around inside his brain, able to get signals from the outside, but unable to send any out. Once I screamed into the black plastic ear of the telephone that I was fed up with everything, and there was just this clicking silence like our phones were conversing in static. I screamed and screamed and there was this clicking silence, clicking silence. Finally I heard his voice, very soft like always. 'You see, Jube? For all you know I may not be here at all. How do you know I'm here? Maybe you invented me, maybe I never existed.'

'I hate your guts,' I said. 'Take your violin and your alternative realities and your circular time and stuff them.'

But we kept looking for the king. According to Noman, he was everywhere, which meant we only had to isolate one 'frame' of him and freeze it, whatever that meant. Noman said his face would ease into the edge of his vision like the side of a ship. But he was always one step ahead of us, whether it was on the stairs to the top of the Tower, or behind the glass case which displayed Marilyn Bell's goggles in the Sports Hall of Fame.

'Listen,' I said to him, 'don't you do magic? Kali told me once that you do magic. Why don't you just make this guy appear and get it over with?'

And he says, 'Sometimes the magic is with me and sometimes it isn't. Sometimes I'm just the witness.'

Christ.

Finally I couldn't stand it any longer, I could feel myself coming unglued. I told Noman to get lost and I came back home. Now there's this awful loneliness and this longing for something I can't name. I'm unsatisfied all the time. Cats and bees are satisfied, so are telephone poles. Why do I want answers when I don't even have the questions? I'm going downhill, I don't enjoy anything anymore, I can't even smoke because he said smoking is a pastime of fools, you try to punctuate reality, to make something happen. So I bought an old typewriter and now I'm writing this all down. Can you imagine - when I started to type the goddamn thing started to throw the alphabet back at me one letter at a time, starting with A, which popped out in my face the very first day. I had to have the thing repaired three times.

I have this horrible cold in my chest and I can't breathe right. Omph says I'm not paying any attention to her. 'Remember the times when we were so close we could catch each other's colds just by talking on the phone,' she says. 'Remember what he told us once, how our faces were made of many circles, faces that had known much laughter.' Well I'm not laughing much these days. Everything's screwed up and I can't concentrate. Time is all distorted, the dates on the calendar from Honest Ed's don't make sense. The bees are all acting very strangely and some of the little bastards have started to sting which they didn't do before, like they're all losing their minds too, all ten thousand of them. And the last time I went back into the city it was awful, cars crashing out of the night like fiends out of Hell. And then when I got into this cab the driver straight away turned around and smiled at me and says 'It's no good, Jube, I'm everywhere.'

Everybody's haunting everybody else, that's what he said.

So my brain's in this place where what's real and what's not real meet or don't meet depending on how you look at it - where things aren't clearly defined and one thing just sort of oozes into another. Some things I'm not sure are real memories, like the time I thought I saw Noman chasing someone round and round those high corridors in Sunnyside Baths, and it was a short fat little guy in a brown suit all right, it was no ghost because I saw it, or did I.

Listen, Noman - the summer's almost here again and it'll soon be August. I don't really want you to drown out there in the lake so I wish you good luck and so does Omph, who is worried about you all the time. Remember, I knew you weren't dead before, I knew it all along. I'm onto you now, you enjoy faking your death, so I won't believe it if I hear you're dead again, you got that? And that's the end of it. When you swim the lake and come out with everybody clapping and cheering I'll come and meet you with a bottle of wine. We'll drink ourselves silly and toast each other in 23 languages and you'll tell me once and for all who you really are and where you come from and what your real name is, for you do have a real name don't you, my indelible friend...?

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