Three Nights in Calgary, Alberta

The snow had melted badly in Calgary that week. Not vanished, not departed with dignity, but collapsed into grey slush at the edges of the sidewalks, as though winter itself has become ashamed of remaining. The city glimmered under a wet yellow haze. Every streetlight seemed exhausted. And after the concert -- after the melancholy voice of Kathleen Edwards had dissolved into applause and beer breath and coats being buttoned -- I wandered toward a karaoke bar called Goose Pub.

I remember now that I entered not from joy, but from inertia.

Inside there was the familiar catastrophe of modern loneliness: flashing VLT machines, people laughing too loudly, women in denim jackets embracing in bathroom lineups, men already drunk enough to confess things they had no intention of remembering. The karaoke screen glowed blue like an aquarium.

That was where Marcus appeared.

He materialized with the peculiar intimacy of certain lonely men, as though we had once known each other in another city, another decade, perhaps another disappointment. Before I had even ordered my second beer, he leaned over my shoulder and explained, with almost priestly seriousness, the proper method for entering song numbers into the machine.

"No, no," he said. "You gotta search by artist first. Otherwise half the codes don't show up."

He spoke quickly, intensely. His friendliness was not ordinary friendliness. It possessed that slightly feverish quality one encounters in train stations at three in the morning.

Then, minutes later, he seized the microphone and screamed "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" in a violent punk register so abrasive and ecstatic that several people burst into genuine laughter. Not mockery exactly -- rather the laughter of witnesses to a small public nervous breakdown transformed into performance art.

He bowed afterward.

"I mostly watch weird movies," he told me later. "Rare shit. Werewolf stuff. European garbage. Things nobody's heard of."

"But you watch Heated Rivalry?" I asked.

"Obviously," he replied, offended. "I'm not dead inside."

Yet he had never seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

This struck me as somehow impossible.

He noticed my accent almost immediately.

"You came to Canada young, right?"

"Yes."

"I can tell. People who come around ten or younger keep pieces of it. Like fossils."

He said this casually, though it lingered with me afterward -- the idea of the self as a fossilized migration.

His friends orbited nearby in varying states of intoxication and affection. Mateo, a handsome Mexican man with sleepy eyes and surprising gentleness, kissed Sarah constantly between songs as though they feared one another might disappear if contact were interrupted too long. Attractive Sarah herself radiated the unstable warmth of someone perpetually on the edge between tenderness and collapse.

"You have a beautiful face," she suddenly informed me.

I laughed awkwardly.

"No, seriously," she insisted. "Even bald, you'd probably still look good."

Mateo nodded solemnly, as though this were a scientific assessment.

Then he asked, "You got plans tonight?"

The question was innocent in wording yet not entirely innocent in atmosphere.

Meanwhile Sarah stormed onto the karaoke stage and screamed "I'm Not Okay (I Promise)" with such emotional violence that the bartender visibly flinched. Mateo recorded her proudly on his phone while occasionally wandering back to feed bills into the VLT machine.

The entire place seemed composed of wounded people attempting to become visible for three minutes at a time.

When my turn came, I sang "Take Me Home, Country Roads" first. The entire pub joined the chorus with the drunken sincerity Canadians reserve for songs about places they do not actually come from. Then later I sang "Disarm" (by the Smashing Pumpkins), and afterward something in the atmosphere shifted. Perhaps it was the lyrics. Perhaps simply the hour. "That's a beautiful song," a woman remarked.

Politics emerged the way blood sometimes emerges through fabric -- gradually, unstoppably.

Marcus announced he had been banned from Instagram for being "too pro-Palestine."

"I probably deserved it," he admitted proudly.

I mentioned rumors regarding the new Ayatollah of Iran -- alleged rumors of homosexuality whispered online with the strange hysteria of modern geopolitics.

Sarah laughed first.

"Oh my God," she cried. "Marcus is the Ayatollah."

Marcus raised his beer like a revolutionary accepting destiny.

Then Sarah called Donald Trump a fascist, specifically a Hitlerite one. The word landed heavily at the table, though not heavily enough to stop anyone speaking.

I said that Benjamin Netanyahu and modern Israel resembled, to me, a kind of twenty-first century fascism and National Socialism; that Trump seemed more like a new Benito Mussolini -- brutal, theatrical, subordinate to larger forces.

Sarah nodded rapidly.

"America's like the junior partner," she said.

Around us the karaoke machine continued blinking patiently, indifferent to ideology.

Then came the interruption.

A broad-faced man nearby, already drunk into belligerence, began arguing with Marcus about gay people, pronouns, identity -- all the exhausted vocabulary of the age. He accused Marcus' friends of becoming "more LGBT" merely to please him.

Sarah immediately announced she was gender-fluid.

Marcus laughed too loudly.

I found myself explaining, absurdly, the existence of gay (and bisexual) men who lived quietly, faithfully -- men who loved one man only, men who did not even practice anal.

"Oh," Marcus said. "Sides."

The drunk man scoffed.

Yet beneath the argument there existed something sadder than hatred: terror. Everyone there seemed afraid that the world was changing without asking permission.

Later Marcus invited me back to the house where he lived with his mother.

"She's asleep anyway," he said. "I work nights. Wednesday's basically my Friday."

I hesitated.

Something inside my chest tightened -- not panic exactly, but an inward pressure, an obscure warning from whatever primitive animal still survives beneath consciousness. I remembered suddenly what my mother always said about strangers who become too friendly too fast. Con artists. Thieves. Lost people (and ghosts of people) seeking other lost people to consume.

And yet Marcus himself did not feel evil.

Only damaged.

He spoke then about his mother with startling bitterness.

"She never acknowledged my coming out message. Not once."

He stared into his beer.

"She's got a collapsed lung now. Smoked herself into dust."

He laughed after saying this, but softly.

Then, without intending to, I told him about my own father -- or rather the absence disguised as a father. How my mother had told me he was dead though he had actually remained alive somewhere, older than her by thirty years, married already, carrying another family through history while I existed outside it like a footnote nobody wished to publish.

"I never knew him," I said. "Everyone else knew the truth before I did."

Marcus whistled low.

"That's drama," he murmured.

But he said it almost kindly.

Near closing time Sarah made some bizarre joke about having "a broken butt," then collapsed laughing against Mateo's shoulder while he kissed her forehead with genuine affection. Marcus meanwhile stared at nothing in particular, exhausted suddenly, as though all his earlier intensity had burned away.

For one brief moment I imagined accepting the invitation. Their apartment. More drinks. Strange confessions until dawn. Perhaps danger. Perhaps merely loneliness extending itself into morning.

But the feeling in my chest remained.

So I declined.

Outside, Calgary was wet and silent. The streets reflected neon in fractured ribbons. I returned alone to my hotel room and drank two cans of haskap berry cider while television light flickered across the curtains.

And what remained with me afterward was not fear exactly, nor regret.

Only the peculiar sadness of realizing how quickly strangers can begin speaking as though they have known one another forever -- perhaps because modern life gives them so few chances to speak honestly at all.