Mon Ami, Vice

      (2015)

      One summer, after a few years of travelling, I decided to return to Montréal, where the living was cheap. While waiting for my flight in Charles de Gaulle Airport, I arranged an apartment rental through Craigslist and arrived that evening to find it located in the Gay Village. I was thirty and broke, trying to finish a novel slated to be published in a year. Every day, I wrote until the late afternoon and then went out looking for lower rent, hearing the occasional wolf whistle from a balcony. In the supermarket, a burly, shirtless man on rollerblades followed me from the apples to the crackers. At the soymilk, I called my mother. “Is this what it’s like to be a woman?” I asked.

      “Until a few years ago,” she said. “Oh, how I miss it.”

      For research purposes, I got a card at the McGill University library. Walking home one evening, I passed a drab, century-old row house on Rue Prince-Arthur, in what’s called the McGill Ghetto. A red For Rent sign hung in the window. I rang the doorbell, and Henry, a tall, balding man, let me in. The house was divided into cramped student apartments. He showed me his: eight square metres that smelled of bread and cheese, a chandelier occupying the ceiling like a dusty spider. He needed someone to take over the lease. He’d been selling gourmet pizzas to a caterer, using the tiny gas stove in the corner, but gambling had gotten the better of him. He was moving back in with his parents so he could regroup. I said I’d been through times like that, omitting that I was going through one right then. I agreed to take over his apartment. With the rent only $400 a month, I could afford to focus on the novel.

For the next few months, I rarely went out. As I struggled to write, a construction company began gutting the row house next door to create luxury apartments. I sat at the desk I’d bought in a church basement sale, my apartment shaking, dust and stale pizza flour drifting down from the ceiling. The workers stripped all the floors, cut the joists out, and knocked down the back wall with sledgehammers. The long summer had ended in brutal cold, and, with the house next door open to the weather, the shared wall frosted over. I cut the fingers off a pair of gloves to type, my breath turning to mist. A few times, I ventured into the alley to watch the demolition. The foreman told me they’d bring in a backhoe to dig out the basement. Without its rear wall, the empty building looked like a dollhouse. I could stare right through it.

      I didn’t go outside often. Instead, I wrote, trying to contain the hunger for living, for real life, that literature stoked in me. I prowled the stairs to the top floor and back, hoping to ease this craving, to find inspiration without straying too far from my computer. During one such prowl, I stopped on a landing. There were three apartments on each floor and one in the basement, but the only people I ever saw were two neighbours, whom I’d passed in the street and taken to be homeless before learning they lived in the building. The woman kept a shopping cart locked to the porch; the old man, who shared a wall with me, howled at night. We’d crossed paths in the hallway, his face the colour of ash, his eyes sunken.

      Fred, the building’s owner, was a short, stout man with dark hair and eyes. He’d grown up in an anglophone village in Gaspésie – the descendant, he proudly told me, of United Empire Loyalists who’d left America after the Revolutionary War. I met him when he dropped by to pick up the rent, and I asked who else lived there.

      “Only those other two,” he said. “They were here when I bought the place. The rest have moved out.” He’d been buying up property across the city and was now too busy to rent out the other apartments, he told me. I proposed finding tenants in exchange for free rent, and he gave me a ring of keys. He also agreed to let me move into the apartment of my choice, which was on the top floor, a larger space with canted ceilings and dormers that looked down into the street.

The next day, I put out a sign. Snooping around the building, I found a blue baseball cap and a red flannel shirt. I used them to create a concierge persona, both for my own entertainment and to keep needy future tenants at arm’s length. When someone rang – often a young woman studying at McGill – out came the flannel. With the cap pulled low over my eyes, I slouched and spoke gruffly. Fortunately, there was a long lull in construction next door, and I soon rented out all the apartments.

      The backhoe arrived with the spring weather. The building shook and heaved, and the tenants knocked at my door. I reassured them the noise would soon be over. We watched from the alley as the backhoe clambered out from the basement like an insect, crawled over the blocky hill of ancient compressed clay it had gouged up, and drove onto a trailer. “All done,” I told my tenants. We went back inside. That night, the building settled, ticking and creaking, producing an occasional hiccup in the floor or a loud crack in the frame, like the popping of an immense knuckle.

      In the morning, sunlight flashed against my eyelids. I looked up at a six-foot-long rift in the wall. With my eye to it, I could see through two rows of bricks and out the window of the gutted house next door. I dressed and took stock of the apartment: cracks in the walls and ceilings, window frames askew. My door was stuck, and I used a hammer to knock the pins out of the hinges. When I pried it from the frame, the surrounding