Chapter 1

The accident was alarming in its brevity. The concise screech of tires. The crackling smash of metal on ­metal. My Corolla's twelve-foot lurch into the (thankfully) ­unoccupied intersection despite my foot planted firmly on the brake. It was a frigid January evening, and I'd been stopped at a red light on the corner of Sherbourne and Highway 2 when this butterscotch-coloured pickup truck hit a rind of black ice and sailed right into my bumper. The next thing I knew, my neck was twanging with whiplash and I had the wind knocked out of me after slamming sternum first into my deploying airbag.

Because I work for an insurance company, I knew, even in those first fretful moments, just how ordinary this accident was. Fender-benders happened all the time in our city, especially during winter when the streets and roads were unpredictably slick. The guy who hit me, despite having a pair of rubber testicles dangling from his hitch and a small, discreet Confederate flag decal on his back window, was incredibly apologetic and kind in the moments after our accident.

"Ah jeez, mister, I'm sorry.I'm so sorry." he kept saying as he waited for the good folks at nine-one-one to come on the line of his cellphone. I waved off his concerns with several Don't worry about it sways of my hand, even as pain ricocheted round my neck and shock passed like voltage through my blood. Our collision had drawn notice from the homeless people who congregated under the single, sad overpass down here, the ones who often wandered up and down the light traffic paused at the stoplight, pleading for spare change. This part of the lakeshore was one of the many impoverished neighbourhoods in our city, a place of drab, leaky concrete and empty, garbage-strewn lots, a strip of highway where a lone bus, the number seventy-five, passed through but once an hour. The resident vagrants approached us with curiosity and concern, but like I said, there was nothing unusual about our crash. The truck's driver seemed pleased when I told him I worked for Percussive Insurance, up on University Avenue, because that's where his own policy was (home and auto and life bundled together in our popular Assurance One package). Yes, this was going to be a straightforward transaction, a simple swapping of policy numbers. No headache at all.

I was really shaken up, though. The EMTs noticed it right away and, as a precaution, decided to give me a lift to the Sisters of St. Patrick, our city's lone Catholic hospital. I was in too much agony by then to protest. I did manage to call Morgana, my wife of thirteen years, to tell her what had happened and where I was headed. Her voice gave off a spritely pop of worry at first, but then quickly modulated into her schoolteacher calm as we discussed how to deal with our now towed-away and totalled Corolla, and how long it would take for her to come down on transit and meet me at St Pat's.

The hospital lounge was near empty - just one pimply teenager in a Burger King uniform cupping a shopping bag full of ice to his forearm, and a middle-aged woman whose "emergency" seemed entirely mental - and yet the wait felt unending. How many doctors would be staffing the ER at this hour? Two, maybe three? As I sat on my cheap vinyl seat and tried to keep my wrenched body still, as per the EMTs' instructions, my eyes gravitated toward a large poster hanging in front of me on the lounge wall. It was one of those posters you wanted to look away from the instant you glimpsed it but couldn't, thanks to its sheer audacity. It showed a young, pretty woman in her late twenties, radiantly Caucasian and infinitely smug, resting one light hand upon the shelf of her swollen stomach. With tilted head and downcast gaze, she stared at that massive bump with an understated smile as God's great light glowed like a sunrise cresting the horizon behind her. The message read:

HAVE

YOU

CONSIDERED

CONCEPTION?

Jesus Murphy, I thought. Bloody Catholics. Here we all were, in this dingy lounge with our whiplashed necks and scalded flesh and broken minds, and they were foisting this nonsense at us. Had the nuns no decency? I should have insisted the EMTs take me to the General instead, where my sensibilities would not be subjected to something so vulgar.

Morgana eventually arrived, still dressed for school in her smart, earth-coloured pantsuit. "Oh honey, honey, are you okay?" she asked as she sat down next to me. "I'm fine," I replied. "Just.you know, more rattled than anything." Her hug was gentle, but I still winced within its grasp. She laced her fingers into mine and got me to briefly recount the details of the accident. Then, to no doubt distract me from my pain, she began describing her day to me, in all its joys and convolutions. Morgana, being Morgana, had already started to get her grade four music class jonesed about the upcoming Spring Fling triple-threat recital. Today, she had even conscripted one of her fellow teachers to join her in a mock concert in front of the tiny class, showing how one could combine singing, acting and dancing into a performative extravaganza. I imagined the kiddies watching on with looks of amusement, bemusement or indifference as she and her co-worker minced and pranced around in front of them. There were just eight other teachers at the school where Morgana taught, but in the stories she told, she could make them sound like a cast of thousands. It was so important to my wife that this tiny coterie of colleagues also be some of her closest friends. They had garden club; they had movie night; they had drinks at Kelsey's once a month. Morgana could relay the most specific and even intimate aspects of their lives at will. I always felt bad that, even after a decade, I still struggled to keep their names straight, these people my wife worked so hard, with middling success, to be close to.

The interminable wait soon took the wind from my wife's sails, and we sat in silence for a while. The Burger King kid ordered himself a pop from the Pepsi machine in the corner, the can emerging from the wide slot on its own tiny drone and buzzing its way into his waiting hand mere seconds after he hit send. Meanwhile, a nurse in teal scrubs - the lone attendant for this floor, it seemed - shuffled by wordlessly. Before long, Morgana's eyes strayed up to the poster on the wall. She too gave a shutter of revulsion, and she works with children all day.

After what felt like an epoch, the nurse summoned me to follow her. "Your wife can come too, if you like." So Morgana accompanied me into the little office and helped me climb gingerly onto the examining table. The physician who arrived - after another lengthy wait, I might add - was positively geriatric. With his frizzy grey hair and brittle physique and gremlin face, he had to be ninety if he was a day. He went about the rote business of diagnosing me: acute whiplash and a bruised rib. He got the nurse to fetch me a neck brace and wrote a prescription for Tylenol 3. It all took less than five minutes.

"Yes, but what about the shock?" I asked.

"You're not in shock," he replied. "Shock has a very clinical ­definition."

"No, no, I mean." I raised my hands and made the jittery ­gesture.

"That will pass," he told me.

Morgana helped me down off the table and we gathered up our stuff. The doc had turned to go, but then he turned back. "Oh sorry," he said, "but I'm obligated to give you this before you leave." From the clear plastic rack next to his blood pressure machine, he pulled out a pamphlet and handed it to me. My stomach lurched as I turned it toward my face. On its folded front cover read the words:

CONSIDER GIVING THE WORLD

THE GIFT OF LIFE

And beneath this was a picture of a fetus, coiled up like a veiny, translucent peanut on a vine, its out-of-proportion eyes all black and alien.

Oh, for mercy's sake! I thought.

Indeed, Morgana and I made a point of chucking the pamphlet into a trash bin the moment we stepped outside the ER's automated doors. That broad bucket, we noticed, was already overflowing with these brochures, a thousand unloved and rejected fetuses staring up at us. Then we grabbed an orange taxi to take us home to our spacious condo unit in the sky, an expansive gondola that overlooked this wide, hollow city.

~

Morgana was sweet and efficient as I lay at home in a neck brace during my brief convalescence. She said not to worry about the car, or the days I was taking off work, or my share of the chores around our condo. She would look after everything while I healed. This proved to be an adjustment for us both. I'd never been seriously injured before, never been seriously ill before, and, I had to admit, didn't cope with feelings of helplessness all that well. This entertained more than annoyed my wife. Morgana's eyes would sparkle with amusement as she watched me struggle with simple tasks like putting on my own socks or reaching for a mixing bowl on its high shelf, grimacing as I did over the invasive strain on my still-whiplashed body. "You know, you don't have to do that yourself," she'd say with a smirk.

During my recovery, while she was at work, I spent most of the day flipping around the twenty-four-hour news channels - CBC Newsworld and CNN and BBC International. I was by no means a news junkie, but one could not help but get absorbed in the defining crisis of our time; one could not avert...