The Beggar's Garden by Michael Christie Page A

hands, screaming. Everybody is buying, selling, or collecting things of certain or possible value. Oppie is smiling and saying hello to random people, handing out cigarettes and American change to any and all who ask.
    Faces swing into our orbit and out again like comets, trajectories forever altered by Oppie’s generous crack policies and philosophical musings. He is electric and alive. His interest is insatiable. Lecturing as he walks, he relates mind-bending scientific concepts with ease and grace. We are a team. Although nobody recognizes him, I feel proud to be partying with such a distinguished man of science. Prostitutes approach him and he respectfully tells them he has no interest in “erotic labour” but gives them rocks and kind words. He is a gentleman.
    Sitting on a bench in Pigeon Park, we form an accidental alliance with a Native kid whose face, crusted with glue, is making sad and sluggish approximations at consciousness. Oppie is offering him the pipe, but I don’t think he even sees it. Oppie blows out a hoot and continues with a conversation I wasn’t sure we were having.
    â€œTake this young man, for example, Hank. Here is a fellow theoretician, a physicist; he studies zero as we infinity. He’s asking the same question we are, but he’s approaching it from the bottom up, beginning with base assumptions, attempting to divide everything by zero. And as you well know, it is at these extremes, these margins, these points which a curve will avoid like poison gas that things really get interesting!”
    â€œYou can call it whatever you want, I guess, Oppie, I think he’s just trying to kill himself.”
    â€œOh no, not kill.” He is scratching under his shirt collar. “Destroy, Hank—he seeks to destroy himself.”
    When we leave, I turn and see that the kid has managed to stagger after us for a few blocks. But he can’t keep up.
    Oppie ducks into a corner store to buy more cigarettes. I’mstraining to remember what it was Oppie actually did as a scientist. I know he made the bomb, but I’m not sure why or when. I can only remember his picture.
    I decide to ask him when he returns. “Oppie, when you were working at the place in the desert with all the other scientists, all working together like you talked about, did you imagine making a better life for people in the future? I mean, did you wonder about how things would be for them?”
    He spins and grabs me by the neck of my T-shirt. His hands are weak and the cherry of his cigarette dances millimetres from my face. “I want you to listen to me very intently, you smug son of a bitch. In our minds, the Krauts could have dropped one on us at any time, understand? We never had any idea what was going to be done with it, is that clear?”
    I lie and say it is.
    Later, we are on the bus because Oppie wanted to “experience the authentic transport of the proletariat.” The bus seems to have cheered him up, so I ask him where he lives and he says he’s been sleeping between the stacks at the university library. I ask him how a genius can die of smoking-related throat cancer and whether he knew it was bad for him, and he tells me to stop tormenting him. I want to ask him what it’s like to be dead, but I don’t want to push it.
    â€œHank, I feel crack cocaine may affect you in a profoundly more negative fashion than it does me,” he says a little snidely. “I believe it has permanently altered your judgment.”
    Sometimes I do worry about lasting damage, tracks laid down that can never be picked up, that sort of thing. I often try to remember what it was like to not know what the crack high feels like, and I can’t. In this way, crack rewrote my history. I remember my mother, who quit smoking cigarettes when she had me and said she dreamed of them almost every night until the day she died. Even when we ate chocolate-chip cookies in bed while watching