It was years ago. I had been going through a patch of intense brooding and had made a big hubbub about severing most of my ties to my past. I had moved into a rent-by-the-week cold water downtown hotel room on Granville Street and had cut my hair off, stopped shaving, and had thorns tatooed on my right arm. I spend my days lying on my bed staring at the ceiling, listening to the drunked brawls in other rooms, the squawk of other TVs and the smashing of other mirrors. My fellow tenants were a mixture of pensioners, runaways, drug dealers and so forth. The whole ensemble had made a suitable glamourous backdrop for my belief that my poverty, my fear of death, my sexual frustration, and my inability to connect with others would carry me off into some sort of Epiphany. I had lots of love to give -- it's just that no one was taking it then. I had thought I was finding consolation in solitude, but to be honest I think I was only acquiring a veneer of bitterness.

My neighbors across the hall at this time were a headbanger couple. Cathy and Pup-Tent. Cathy was a seventeen-year-old runaway from Kamloops up north; Pup-Tent was a bit older and from back East. They both had the ghostly complexions, big hair and black leather wardrobe that heavy metal people like so much. They tended to live at night and sleep late into the afternoon, but sometimes I would see Pup-Tent being the very picture of enterprise down on Granville Street, selling hash cut with Tender Vittles to treeplanters on city leave. Or I would see Cathy, selling feather earrings in the rain on Robson Street. Sometimes I would see them both at the corner grocery store where they would be shopping for Kraft dinner, grenadine syrup, peeled carrot sticks, Cap'n Crunch, After Eight dinner mints and Lectric Shave. We would nod in a neighborly way and occasionally we would meet in the pub at the Yale Hotel where we would get to talking, and it was via these encounters that I got to know them. They would sit there drawing skulls and crossbones on each other's transdermal nicotine patches and drink draft beers.

By themselves, they could be interesting, but as a twosome their conversation was a bit limited. Sometimes it is nice to sit with people and not say much of anything.

But any adoration in their relationship was strictly one-way. Cathy was in love with Pup-Tent -- her first love -- whereas I suspect Pup-Tent saw Cathy as just an interchangable girlfriend unit. He would "keep her in line" by flaunting the ease with which he could seduce other women. He was good looking by any standard, and his main pick-up technique was to pump out negative signals so that women with low self-esteem would be glued to him. In this way he could always have the upper hand. A not-so-fresh barfly would ask him, "How old do you think I am, cutie?" and Pup-Tent would reply, "Thirty-three and divorced... or twenty-eight with a drinking problem." If she was his type, then she'd be hooked then and there.

This flirting drove Cathy crazy. Sometimes when Pup-Tent disappeared from the table she would tell me so. When Cathy's sister, Donna, came down from Kamiloops to visit one day and sat with us, she asked Cathy what it was that she saw in Pup-Tent. "Let me get this straight, Cath: jail record... violent... no job..."

"Oh," Cathy replied, "but I like the way he walks."

On evenings when Pup-Tent and I were by ourselves at the pub, he would ask me things such as, "How come a woman screwed up on drugs is so much scarier than a guy screwed up on drugs?" And I would reply, "Is this a joke?" and he'd say, "No, I'm really asking you."

In general, though, they seemed affable enough with each other, and most of the time their conversation moved along predictable lines.

After a while, though, the two of them began having fights that were loud enough to wake me up from across the hall. Cathy would appear on the street with the occasional bruise or red eyeball. But as with most couples involved in this sort of relationship, the subject of domestic violence never came up in their conversations with others.

One day Cathy, myself, and a street kid -- a male exotic dancer on his day off -- were discussing death over a plate of fries with gravy at Tat's Coffee Inn. The question was, "What do you think death is like?" Cathy said it was like you're in a store and a friend drives up to the front door in a beautiful car and says "Hop in -- let's go on a trip!" And so you go out for a spin. And once you're out on the road and having a great time, suddenly your friend turns to you and says, "Oh, by the way, you're dead," and you realize that they're right, but it doesn't matter because you're happy and this is an adventure and this is fine.

Once, on a morning after a particularly noisy night, Cathy and I were walking down Drake Street and we saw a crow standing in a puddle, motionless, the sky reflected on its surface so that it looked as thought the crow was standing on the sky. Cathy then told me that she thinks that there is a secret world just underneath the surface of our own world. She said that the secret world was more important than the one we live in. "Just image how surprised fish would be," she said, "if they all knew all the action going on just on the other side of the water. Or just imagine yourself being able to breathe underwater and living with the fish. They secret world is that close and it's THAT different."

I said that the secret world reminded me of the world of sleep where time and gravity and things like that don't matter. She said that maybe they were both the same thing.

One day I came home from the library, where I had spent the afternoon trying to make people feel middle class by scowling at them. The door to Cathy and Pup-Tent's apartment was wide open so I poked my head in and said "Hello?" I couldn't believe what a dump their place was -- strewn with rusting bike chains, yellowed house plants, cigarette boxes, and butts, Metallica banners, beer bottles, grubby blankets, and Cathy's clothes. I said "Cath? Pup? You guys in?" but there was no answer.

I stood there looking around when Cathy came in the door looking in awful condition and carrying a bag of Burger Kind food. She said that Pup-Tent was gone, that he'd taken off with a stripper to Vancouver Island and that, in the end, he had gone nuts because Cathy had erased all of his cassette tapes by microwaving them in his mini microwave.

We stood in silence for a little while. Cathy picked up a few stray garments. Then she said, "You used to live over on the mountain, didn't you -- over on the North Shore?"

Cathy wanted to see the water reservoir up the Capilano Canyon, up behind Cleveland Dam. She wouldn't tell me why until we got there, but she seemed in an obviously unhappy state and playing tour guide was the least I could do to cheer her up. And so we took the bus to the North Shore to the mountains overlooking the city.

The bus climed up Capilano Road, past the suburban houses nested inside the tall Douglas firs, hemlocks and cedars. These houses seemed far enough away from my present life as to seem like China.

Further up the mountain, the late-afternoon sky was cloudy and dark. When the wet air from the Pacific Ocean hits the mountains, it dumps all of its wetness right there. The sky was just starting to rain as we got off the bus near the Cleveland Dam and, as we crossed the road, I could tell we were going to get soaked.

The reservoir itself was a short walk away and was quickly enough pointed out to Cathy, but she looked disappointed when she saw it, though -- the large, loch-like lake stretching back into the steep, dark, mountain valley. She said, "like what's with the barbed wire fence -- you mean we can't go in and touch the water?"

I said we did, but it would involve some tromping through the woods and she said this was just fine, and so we headed up the road past a sign saying: WATERSHED: NO ADMITTANCE to a place where we used to have outdoor parties when I was in high school.

Cathy silently smoked a cigarette and clutched her purse to her side as we walked past a gate and up the dirt access road. The mountains above us were cloaked in mist up at their tops and we heard only the occasional bird noise as we cut off the road and into the trees. Cathy was immediately drenched as we cut through the underbrush of salmonberry bushes, grasses, and juvenille firs. Her big hair was filled with spider-webs and fir needles and dead huckleberry leaves; her black jeans were wet and clammy at her ankles. I asked her if she wanted to go back but she said, no, we had to continue and so we did, tromping deep into the black echo-free woods until we saw the glint of water ahead of us -- the reservoir. Cathy then said to me, "Stop -- don't move," and I froze.

I thought she had seen a bear or had pulled a gun out of her purse. I turned around and she had frozen in mid-motion. She said, "I bet if we froze right here and didn't move and didn't breathe we could stop time."

And so we stood there, deep in the woods, frozen in mid-motion, trying to stop time.

Now: I believe that you've had most of your important memories by the time you're thirty. After that, memory becomes water overflowing into an already full cup. New experiences just don't register in the same way or with the same impact. I could be shooting heroin with the Princess of Wales, naked in a crashing jet, and the experience still couldn't compare to the time the cops chased us after we threw the Taylors' patio furniture into their pool in the eleventh grade. You know what I mean.

I think Cathy at some level also felt this way, too -- and that she realized all of her important memories would be soon enough taken -- that she had X-number of years ahead of her of falling for the wrong guys -- mistreaters and abusers -- and that all of her memory would the be used up in sadness and dead ends and being hurt, and at the end of it all there would be... nothing -- no more new feelings.

Sometimes I think the people to feel the saddest for are people who are unable to connect with the profound -- people such as my boring brother-in-law, a hearty type so concerned with normality and fitting in that he eliminates any possibility of uniqueness for himself and his own personality. I wonder if some day, when he is older, he will wake up and the deeper part of him will realize that he has never allowed himself to truly exist, and he will cry with regret and shame and grief.

And then sometimes I think the people to feel saddest for are people who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder -- people who closed the doors that lead us into the secret world -- or who had the doors closed for them by time and neglect and decisions made in times of weakness.

What happened was this: Cathy and I walked to the edge of the reservoir's water and from her purse she removed a Ziploc baggie containing two filmy-tailed, rather stupid looking goldfish that Pup-Tent had bought for her the week before in an isolated moment of kindness. We sat down on the smooth rocks next to the spotless, clean, infinitely dark and deep lake water. She said to me, "You only get one chance to fall in love for the first time, don't you?" And I said, "Well, at least you got the chance. A lot of people are still waiting."

She then poked into the glassy still water, made small ripples, and threw a stone or two. Then she took the baggie, placed it under the water and punctured the membrane with her sharp black fingernails. "Bye-bye fishies," she said as the two languidly wriggled away down into the depths. "Make sure you two stay together. You're the only chance that either of you is ever going to get."

jon@gas.uug.arizona.edu