Chapter 1: The Hearth - Asbestos

Fall 1981

Stay away from the hearth, came the order, his dad voice deep and of course not unthreatening. For the moment he was smoking in the backroom, the solarium, and I was whiling away the morning – not at kindergarten, for some reason now lost; my days then were one long and spasmodic vacation – but creeping up to the living room to stare at our guest, a man dressed all in blue and white, skin-tight jeans and white T-shirt with a red pack of cigarettes rolled up in the short sleeve that hugged his bicep. Red, too, the tattoo further down the same arm: a bird.

An odd garden of big round stones had cropped up on the wood of our living room floor. The blue man was a mason, and his job, a new fireplace, drew me toward him with a seemingly irresistible force, even though his work kept me from racing and crashing my little toy cars. My two favourites, a black-andflame Firebird Trans Am (Matchbox) and a yellow Datsun pickup (Hot Wheels), were perfectly matched arch-enemies. Stay away from the hearth, he’d warned me more than once, but now my dad was on the other side of the house while the blue, white, and red man was busy mixing mortar outside.

Just beyond the larger stones, a black hole of brick and anthracite soot hissed my sulphureous, sibilant name: Steve.

When I tried to open my eyes, only one obeyed, and in place of the other was a pain at the base of my forehead – You never listen, Steve! – and I felt a crushing thumb against my eyebrow, I told you you were gonna fall, and I felt a rivulet of blood flowing down the bridge of my nose, and there was the bird on the arm of the man in blue, seen with my single eye. I heard, for the first time in my young life, the word stitches. It went over my head. And then, a spark later, a shiver ran through me when I thought I heard, or maybe wanted to hear, cauterization.