My dreams mean nothing. I am almost worn out by their idiocy. Sometimes I dream about people I know or things that have happened, only to find that the details become more and more inaccurate as the dream continues, and I have to wake up and revise them. I dream that the wide roads of a Manitoba village lead to downtown Toronto or, just as easily, the Lenin Library. Lying still in the gloom I might say: That's not quite right, or: There is no such person, and anyway - they certainly wouldn't have done that. This must be a common experience, and I should hardly have remarked on it but for a chance encounter with a man I knew years ago as a student.

My first impression of Lambert, when we met at the Technical College, was of the sort of youngish man about whom almost anything is plausible because he is such a liar. Had he really taken those courses? Could his prof have said that? Did he actually know that person? Was he really short of cash, and for the reasons given? After spending a couple of evenings with Lambert it seemed as if the sum of what he had said called for rigorous debugging. Or perhaps (as we failed philosophy students liked to say) his statements merely lacked falsifiability. No separate part was demonstrably wrong, or in obvious contradiction to any other part, but the whole thing ultimately made no sense. If he were in the process of breaking up with his girlfriend, why then did he have to keep phoning her? If he was going to have to keep phoning her all evening, why ask another woman to join him? If he had a woman there in the bar, why insist on my coming out? The ramifications, in short, never looked like the right ramifications. In any case, to be his confessor was to be torn
between pity and bafflement. There was no very purposeful malice in him: with his pale face and tiny eyes he would have done well in the role of a myopic, self-involved hit-man, who needs several tries to get the job done, assuming he feels up to tackling it. I sometimes used to wonder if his character could not actually be improved by a measure of outright moral turpitude.

Some weeks after we had both finished our courses, I saw him in a newly-opened grocery store, a sort of Jet Propulsion Lab hangar that sold, in addition to groceries, almost everything you could think of weighing less than sixty pounds. He overtook me near the bulk foodstuffs area and said: "Come and meet my cousin, she's having a coffee in the atrium! This way."

"Oh," I said. " Okay. You know, I haven't been in here yet. It's pretty impressive. All this food. They even have lawn furniture."

"Yeah. That's right. I've told her about you. She's anxious to meet you."

"What? What do you mean?"

"She's only here for a week. Might be going to school here next
year."

In this special "Atrium" - actually a lot of high tables and
stools near some windows - I could see a woman in her mid-twenties wearing
a pea-jacket and stirring her coffee as if it were a new yet somehow
unpromising activity for her. She looked up at our approach, forced
herself to smile, and then lay her head on the table. She continued to
stir her coffee, which was about five inches from her face. I noticed she
also wore a pair of silver hoops through the covering of one nostril, the
one that was now uppermost.

"This is Janet," said Lambert, and then to his cousin he said:
"We're just going to get a coffee, and then we'll come and sit with you -
if that's, you know, no problem."

"No problem," said Janet.

When we had returned to the table with our coffees, Janet managed
to pull herself together and the pair of them sat there waiting for me to
say something.

"So, Janet," I said, "Lambert tells me you're thinking about going
to school? What sort of thing are you interested in?" But at that moment,
and throughout the rest of the small talk, or micro talk, that followed,
the suggestion that she might be interested in anything - that she could
be cozened into interesting herself in anything, that she could be forced,
even at gunpoint, to conceive of anyone's taking an interest in anything -
that had to have been in very poor taste, I felt. Lambert, however, was
studying me with genuine curiosity, even as his cousin vanished down a
spiral of ennui. And that was the last I saw of Lambert or his cousin for
a few years.

[Any sort of database work - at least, the sort I have encountered -
grinds very slowly but exceeding fine]
I was toiling as a peon, supposedly refining the databse which, it was
hoped, would one day resemble a city directory]
For I hadn't actually had to go out collecting people's phone numbers
The integrity of this knowledge.
Work is
Very little that you can do to counter this, but it has to be done all the
time.
Notlike celestial bodies, which appear to move unbidden, but betray a
desire to slow down and stop. Databases want to fudge up.]

One evening I was sitting in a bar after work, too bemused by a
day's worth of corrupt data to go home immediately. And there he was,
recognizable by the facial expression of someone trying to extract an
important article from the interior of an unyielding drawer. He sat down
next to me with a modest beam of triumph.

"Lambert!" I said. "How have you been? Up to anything?"

"I'm great," he said. "I've got this job - sysadmin at, uh - " and
here he lit a cigarette with a flourish.

"Where?"

"Yeah! I was even in New England for a few years, but it's great
to be back. So, where's that fool's paradise I keep
hearing about?"

"This is it, I suppose."

He looked around the bar, noted the decor, the sequestered
couples. Then he said: "I've been seeing this woman - she lives here in
town, I think you met her a few years ago - we used to hang out together
back then. She's involved with galleries and all that stuff. Anyway, after
this I have to go and pick her up!"

"Good, good," I said, "you sound excited."

"I am - for once. It's all been really good. You know - man, I was
- just a second, I have to make a phone call. Back in a second."

"Okay."

I watched him glide back to where the pay phones were. This
contrasted well with his former habit of shuffling off like a man in
leg-irons to touch base with some discontented girlfriend. I used to keep
hearing about his rash dealings with other people, and marvelled at
rumours of all kinds of trouble - drugs, fistfights, other men's wives -
but there again, what to believe? We failed philologists like to say: go
with the lectio difficilior. This means that if there are two versions of
a passage, the one that makes less sense is the one to trust, on the
assumption that a scribe who did not understand it is likely to have
emended the passage to something simpler and, therefore, further from the
original. And so I was inclined to discredit the obvious; and here was my
friend reemerging from perdition and blind folly, and I began to think:
What a good thing! People can and do work changes in their lives, and
probably with their head in the clouds the whole time. If you've a clear
picture of what you are doing, it's probably nothing. And I could do that
too! Instead of going from a good job to a worse, and losing one thing
after another.

Lambert came back from the pay phones with a broad smile, finished
his beer, and said: "Well, good to see you, gotta go - I'll give you a
shout soon."

And so he dropped out of sight for a good while. I find I have no
trouble remembering our conversations almost verbatim, and without
inhibition; yet, at the same time, I have almost never given the man a
second thought. He's there when he's there, and not when he's not.

It is no more than an illusion, this trick one's memory has of
isolating a single past event from others, as if it would be more
faithfully preserved for being unreachable. If I am not careful, a kind
of panic sets in when happy scenes come to mind: I run into a protective
hedge, which both keeps the memory clear and cuts me off from it, almost
taking it out of my possession and into the glass case of a public museum,
or into the region of unrewarding, common fantasy. To think of myself, for
instance, teasing the 12-year-old son of a colleague one summer afternoon,
letting on to be disappointed at his reluctance to play a difficult piece
on the piano:

"C'mon, just play it!"

"I'm not, uh ... I'm working on another piece, let's see ... Oh!
Sorry."

"I can hear that on the radio. Quit stalling. Play that Bach
thing. Full speed ahead. I know you can do it. Begin."

"Listen to this, first ... whoops. Sorry." He went stumbling
through a pop tune from the sixties.

I said, "What do you mean by eating chocolate and then playing the
piano without washing your hands first? Look at those keys! Who'd want to
play after you?"

He went on playing, and the left hand sounded as if it were coming
from the next room, which tempered the performance and even made something
consoling of it. Gusts of rain were hitting the windows behind us, and I
imagined that if the house were to come loose from its foundation and
slide down the hill, no one would care.

Whatever ironic friendship we had then was quite different from
the merely emblematic goodwill we would show each other years later, when
he had grown into a morose geologist full of political concerns, the
family scattered, and his parents' house - I'm afraid that sunny house
smelling of cold tea and varnish must have been torn down, to join the
rows of many such houses in my mind. Still, it was undeniably there and,
if I make the effort, the memory should be neither beyond my reach nor
compromised.

With Lambert things were quite different. Talking to him now was
the same as talking to him at any time, in the distant past or the remote
future. It was difficult to form any static picture of him. We had very
little in common, but I sensed that he had been a mild disappointment to
parents and teachers and, along the way, to other people as well, if not
to everyone. You can see something of this in a person's face, a resigned,
helpless expression that comes of having to keep apologising.

Once he showed me a little toy he had made called "Elugbo". Its
heart was a small executable file called "elugbo.exe", which, when placed
in a directory, could then read any text file and transform it into an
image. "I got the idea from that famous Chinese saying about painting and
poetry," he explained. I am not very expert with that sort of thing, but I
tried it out. In addition to the executable, there were some other files
and a dictionary. You typed in the name of your text file (and its path,
if necessary), hit "enter", and very soon a .gif file was produced. The
programme had read the file, noted the number of words and their length,
used the dictionary to ascertain what parts of speech they were, even
made some calculation about periods per number of words (Lambert did tell
me that the presence of colons altered the whole thing considerably), and
then translated all this into numerical data. I would guess one of the
"Elugbo" files contained a template of some ready-made image - probably
pornographic - and that the data gleaned from the text were used to modify
it in some arbitrary fashion. Anyway, the pictures turned out by this
thing were rather curious: bleached moonscapes and repeated cactus
patterns. I unleashed it on a tedious paper about database architecture I
was trying to write. The paper was never finished, but I framed the
picture Lambert's toy had produced - an enormous cashew shape on a pink
background, with an intriguing blank trapezoid at the top - and visitors
to my place would invariably ask me about it.

I knew that after finishing up at the Technical College, Lambert
had found a job as a systems analyst with a telephone company, and that he
had begun to develop his own particular ideas about books and movies. For
example, one evening, shortly before he was to leave for this big job, I
was at the apartment he shared with his brother in the slightly gentrified
North End. When I drew attention to a videocassette of Madame Bovary lying
on the floor, he said: "Some people read Madame Bovary and think - it's a
story about some French woman who has an affair that turns out badly,
which is highly improbable. But what else could happen? In a movie like
that?"

"Yes?"

"Well," he said, "That's exactly how every story goes: things are
normal, then all Hell breaks loose. Then they get back to normal' again,I
except - it's a different normal'! That's just confusing. I don't like
the idea of anything being normal'. I've had some really weird people k
tell me I'm not normal. It just makes me want to reverse-engineer the
human soul."

"H'm, well," I said, "I think you have to bear in mind that it is
a story - not an executable file."

"Well, yeah!" he said, "If you think that way."

I had a look at the digital clock in the mirror over the
mantelpiece: it appeared to read 52:50. When I turned to look at it, the
clock itself showed 02:52, which, I decided, was late enough.

I left his place convinced that one of us didn't know what we were
talking about. His stupidity, in a word, was stupefying. It made other
people stupid. It threatened to make hysterical morons of all who heard
him. The most coherent thing I ever heard him say was: "If you get a
system to do something, then you get all the problems associated with not
being able to fail to do that thing - and that might not be reversible."
There is unutterable wisdom in this.

It was a good few weeks later that he introduced me to his cousin
at the grocery store. I don't think it even occurred to me to ask why he
hadn't left for the job he was supposed to be getting. It would have
seemed banal, or unsporting.

Around Christmastime I was at a run-down mall, practically vacant
except for a delicatessen and a bookstore. I was using one of the
payphones and there, right at the corner of the hallway containing
elevators and payphones, was Lambert, inexplicably talking on a cell
phone.

"Like, signing a contract for next year," he said. "Yeah. Cool.
Excellent. Okay, I'll talk to you later. Right. Bye. Okay! Bye. Yeah." I
was still on the phone and he was in a hurry, so we just nodded to each
other. On my way out of the mall I thought about this scrap of a
conversation, and it occurred to me: One day there might be a fresh series
of buildings here, named for an obscure benefactor who is named, in turn,
after a still more obscure actor. That is one of the ways of commerce.

A year later, it seems, Lambert introduced me to Janet again, this
time as his fiancee. I was at a small art gallery, wondering what to do
with myself one afternoon, having seen all the unobjectionable movies and
some of the cartoons at the local multiplex. The gallery next door
suggested itself as a place to loiter. It had the attraction of being
housed in a former bank with neo-classical touches, and you could still
picture brisk young men inviting important clients in pince-nez into their
inner sanctum for a chat about debentures. The building also contained
several bars and a shop full of clothes and knick-knacks produced by
remote peoples.

Lambert was in the middle of the main gallery, surrounded by
crockery and ceramic things, staring into space. Janet was at his side,
evidently waiting for a reply from him. As I drew near, I saw that she was
almost out of breath.

"Lambert!" I said.

"Oh," he said. "How are you?"

"Fine. Quite a - I didn't think you'd be - "

"Janet!" said Lambert. "Yeah! I don't think you've met -"

I said, "I think - "

And Janet said: "Okay. Okay. I'll be over at Café Vienna. I'm
going now."

We watched her leave methodically: gathering her coat, checking
her watch, her keys, her purse.
"Well, I hope I - "
"She was just leaving," said Lambert. "You met her before, right?
Janet? She's my fiancee. We're going to be married this summer."

I congratulated him and knew, rather than guessed, that she was
not his cousin. We spoke a bit more about their plans, and then I asked
him if he shouldn't be joining his fiancee at the Café Vienna. "You should
go," I said, "I think I'll stick around here and have a look upstairs."

"Oh, no. No."

"Won't she be expecting you, or something?"

"No."

We reviewed the contents of the main gallery.

"Lots of pots in here," I said.

"Pots, yeah! Pots - you know, you think - pots? Huh? - but - the
thing I like about pots is the idea that they're intended to contain other
things. She also makes little crates out of clay, and tiny containers."

"Who? Janet?"

"Oh yes," said Lambert.

"I thought you said she work with galleries and things? I had no
idea she actually made pots."

"No, no. She's a potter. She makes pots. Flings them, or hurls
them. Throws them. This is just some of her work."

"Yes, I see." We inspected a table top of tiny brown boxes and
jugs.

"That's a special technique", I said, pointing to a cylinder, "
with salt or something."

"Yeah yeah yeah. Textures. You can get some really bizarre
effects, so if you were in a dark room and picked it up, this amphora -
you'd go, Whoah!', and you'd throw it down, probably - it's that
rebarbative."

"Yes, it looks prickly."

"Yeah! And so - you see - crash! - that's the whole point."

We looked at some more blobs of shiny beige clay with other
features.

"So," I said, "This wedding of yours - "

"Yes - but - excuse me for a moment?"

"Sure, sure."

"No, just - I'll be back in two secs." He begged for credulity.
"Really."

"Okay." I said, and when he was three lengths away I left. On my
way back home I had to pass the Café Vienna. It was crammed between a
yoghurt stand and a small Tim Horton's, and one wall boasted a mural of
the Danube, looking a bit like the Musquodoboit with a Disney castle on
its bank. Curiously enough, I have seen employees of the Café Vienna come
on shift carrying large containers of Tim Horton's coffee. I didn't look
inside. I felt sure that Lambert would be there, listening to Janet and
looking for a way out.

And so he told me about his fiancee's dumping him. Well, this was
undoubtedly so, because there was no fiancee at his side.

He said: "I was completely in love with her, we'd been together
for about a year and we were planing to get married. I even bought
engagement rings, very expensive. And I don't know what happened. She
decided, with the help of our good friends, that there were all these
things wrong with me."

I thought: Is it really my business to ask people what they're up
to, how they're doing, whether I can be of any assistance, all that? No. I
think, if I've learned anything lately (and in life one learns things the
way a rat in a maze does, exclusively through failure), it would have to
be that you should never get people to explain anything.

"Her friends would do that? Your friends?"

"I was out for the evening, and when I came home she was gone.
They told her, you know, spent the entire evening telling this and this
about me. You know."

"Yes. This and this. That's bad."

"So. You know."

"Yes."

That must be true. Her friends had gone and told her this and this
about him. And this and this implies a great many serious failings in any
human being. It's the this and this that undoes the weave we are so
careful to supervise, and this keeps our life in the experimental stages.
By way of epilogue, he explained that she came from an illustrious family,
who had no use for idlers. "She's Kafka's niece", he said.

"Kafka? Franz Kafka?"

"Right. Her father was Kafka's younger brother."

It's not an uncommon surname. And I do know there was a novelist
and screenwriter called John (or Hans) Kafka, who wrote Dead Men Tell No
Tales, or something like that.

"You'd think people would know about that. Kafka's having a
younger brother," I said.

"Yeah! Funny. It's funny how people are," said Lambert. He quickly
explained:

It was an unknown younger brother named Felix who, as a sickly
child, was taken by relatives to Palestine. He remained there throughout
his youth, eventually becoming an electrical engineer. During the
Partition he was wounded when a generator he was inspecting came under
heavy fire; he spent some months in a sanatorium, mulling over his future,
and then took it into his head to go to America. Here he worked initially
as an electrician, but within a few years found himself behind a
television camera on Your Show of Shows.

At this I felt it was incumbent on me to say something, anything -
some kind of oral punctuation - though whether to stem this tide of
hogwash or promote it, I wasn't certain. It was easier to believe that the
story was true than that he had made it up.

"Ah," I said, "Sid Caesar, eh? Your Show of Shows. That was quite
a show."

Lambert nodded encouragingly. "He worked a few other shows, you
know. The early days of television."

I, too, nodded briskly to convey that it was a time to be
regretted fondly.

"Although, I don't know," said Lambert, "some of that old stuff,
you see it on cable - it doesn't seem that funny to us . Except The
Honeymooners, of course."

We spent the rest of the evening talking about old television
shows, movies, exotic Internet sites. Talking nonsense in the hope of
making sense.

Of course, immediately afterwards there formed in my mind,
unbidden, a picture of this bogus Kafka brother as a vigorous, balding man
with a sandy moustache. I imagined him doing fairly well out of his
television work and living in a natty suburb with two cars, a wife, and
several exasperated children. The children have to be driven places,
entertained, given expensive sweaters, a car each on their sixteenth
birthdays. "Oh, Dad!" they protest, whenever he indulges in the crude
whimsy of one of his practical jokes. And he just laughs proudly, the
raucous master of their split level. And why not?

As for the more famous brother, his stories also seem to take
flight into an odd dimension, becoming something patently not what they
started out to be. A man, finding himself out of coal in the winter, rides
his coalscuttle through the air to the coal dealer. People rush from an
ordinary life to seek a punishment they cannot begin to fathom. Who has
not puzzled over the curious freedom from explanation in the midst of a
glut of reasoning? One could turn to the Book of Job and find, there too,
that the universe is baffling and human undertakings pure knavery, and
that even a mortal sin can be pretty much winked at, in the long run; but
in these stories no relevant point, be it ever so minor, is ever left
untreated, and the reader feels he is perusing a very conscientious
affidavit. And what writer has not toyed with imitations of that
quasi-legalese style for his own ramblings? What reader hasn't looked for
clues hidden in there? But the seamlessness of those twisting arguments,
the skill in assembling the unassemblable are the inimitable thing, and
its intention is not to bamboozle but to summarize. (I ought to point out
that the exact opposite is true of a database, a humble example of which
is the telephone book. Here the only goal is prompt and orderly accuracy,
and one hopes no spurious meaning will pop up). But do these briefs of the
elder Kafka brother go any distance toward mapping this life we have? This
life of running into Lambert and his stories? Does anything? Is there a
cartographer who can do that?

I wouldn't put my hand in the fire for this, but it could be that
Kafka's brother and niece now have their tenuous existence somewhere. And
from time to time I am tempted to believe there is something worthwhile in
the relaxed world of dreams, where the dead can live and one can go home
by impossible, familiar, half-forgotten streets.