Free Going Home Again by Dennis Bock Page B

having fallen by fifteen degrees in the space of twenty-four hours. I felt like I’d just won the lottery. “But somehowit doesn’t feel real yet,” I told Miles. “So far that ticket’s just another piece of paper.”
    “It’ll take you farther than a university degree,” he said.
    I walked over to the
dépanneur
two blocks away to pick up something for the three of us to eat and drink that evening. A pleasant mid-November snow was falling over the city, sparkling in the glare of the streetlamps and swirling in the headlights of passing cars. I bought two roast chickens, a bag of frozen French fries and some wine and beer, and as I walked back, bottles clinking in the bag, I considered my good fortune. In a week’s time I’d be sitting in a square in Athens or nosing around the Parthenon or ferrying out in the direction of one of those mythical islands. The only thing I didn’t understand was why it had taken me so long to take that step.
    We opened the wine and tucked into our meal, and once the wine was finished we switched to beer, and then Miles brought out the bottle of grappa he’d been saving for a special occasion. We were sitting at the small table they’d set up beside the bamboo curtain, and by now it was overflowing with glasses and plates and bottles. The Waterboys were playing on the turntable. At the time it was Miles and Holly’s favorite record.
    “I don’t think I’ll need to eat for a year,” I said.
    “That was some serious food,” Miles said.
    “You’re going to need reinforcements in Greece,” Holly said, smiling radiantly. “You’re going to need some help over there.”
    I told them I was counting on it.
    “Every day you’ll look out a window and see the Mediterranean,” Miles said, following the song’s drumbeat by slapping his hands against his knees. “In my book that’s as close as you can get to heaven without actually dying. It probably snows there once every hundred years.”
    “I’d sure like to see it,” Holly said.
    “You will,” I said. “We’ll all see it together. I’m leaving a bit sooner than you guys is all.”
    We’d talked about them coming over next year and the three of us renting a stone house on an island and living some sort of Leonard Cohen lifestyle. We had no dates, only the fantasy that we were reaching out into the world together and would find and hold something that would be ours forever and we’d be different than everyone else. It was what the song Miles was drumming on his knees was about, and what Holly had been getting at when she took me to their favorite diner my first weekend in Montreal two years earlier. Take some chances, she’d said, since you only go around once. She wasn’t going to be the sort of person to look back on her life with regret, none of us was. Such was the promise of our youth.
    A thin layer of ice had formed in the toilet bowl during the night. The next morning the thermostat read eight degrees Celsius. One of us had left the window open in the washroom. I’d soon be far away from this frigid cold, I thought, but I didn’t have the energy tothink for long about my coming adventure. I just had to get through the day. I had one of those crippling hangovers that drags you along in its wake, selfish and demoralizing in its all-consuming physical ache. I closed the washroom window, took two Tylenols and lay back down on the couch. I slept for another hour, then got up and tried to watch a bit of TV and eat a sliver of toast. At around two that afternoon I cycled over to the gym.
    It was frigid outside—the snow had stopped falling—and I began to feel like myself again. I had access to the squash courts and swimming pool despite having dropped out, since I still had my student ID. That afternoon I swam twenty slow lengths and then, exhausted, sat in the sauna with my eyes closed and felt the alcohol pour out of my skin. People came and went. I tried to think about Greece again, and the beaches, and all