Google Streetview image edited by Aaron Kreuter


When I was seventeen, my best friend Adam had to drive to an organic farm near Sarnia to pick up his older brother, Drew. It was their grandfather’s ninetieth birthday, and Drew’s ride had fallen through last minute. Adam was still recovering from having his wisdom teeth removed and didn’t want to go alone, so I was going to go with him to keep him company; Adam promised he would let me drive for a few exits, even though I didn’t yet have my license. In the driveway before we left, Adam’s father handed me a small envelope with nothing written on it. Later, as we merged onto the highway, Adam’s face swollen, his eyes wet from the pain meds, I ripped open the tooth-white envelope. Inside were three fifty-dollar bills, and a note, written on a regular yellow post-it in black Sharpie: “Fuck you very much.” Adam and I laughed about it all the way to the farm.

That was Adam’s dad. The first time I met him I was nine years old; a big, imposing man with a serious demeanor, he took my small hand and gave it a hard shake. “Call me Phil,” he said gruffly. Phil—as was the case with my parents, my parents’ friends, and a good number of my friends’ parents—grew up in Montreal and moved to Toronto in the eighties; unlike my parents, who were raised in the communal exuberance of the secular Montreal Jewish community, Phil had a serious Jewish upbringing, going to Yeshiva, studying religious texts, observing the Sabbath. Phil’s parents wanted him to be a rabbi, and apparently so had he for a while, though he ended up a middle manager at a national insurance firm. Phil had been an amateur boxer, still had a bag hanging in the basement. He jogged every morning, no matter the temperature. “Cold enough to freeze your balls off,” he’d say, a white towel around his broad shoulders. He was a voracious reader: every time I went over there, new books were piled on the side table in the living room under his reading lamp. I would imbibe the new spines with interest, awe, and fear. The combinations of books! It was like nothing I had ever seen before, nor would see again. Seneca, Alice Munro, and Mendelsohn. Dostoevsky, Maimonides, and Mordecai Richler. Tagore, George Eliot, and Asimov. Josephus, Sappho, James Baldwin, and Confucius.

One high school evening, driving Adam and me to a friend’s house, Phil brought up, seemingly unprovoked, that for much of his early life he had wanted to be a writer. “In my twenties and thirties I’d sit at the typewriter every morning from 4:30 to 6:30, attacking the keys. But you know what boys? I had nothing new to say. Nothing of substance to add. My first major disappointment.” Phil was a serious man, and I took what he said seriously. The last few minutes of the drive nobody spoke. When we pulled into the driveway two of our friends were yanking a beer keg out of their trunk—our friend’s parents being out of town—and Adam and I braced for admonishment. Instead, Phil simply nodded goodbye, his head barely moving, and we scrambled out of the car.  

***

We were on a canoe trip, something we did every year since I moved back to Toronto in my mid-thirties and we reconnected, heartily paddling away from a two-kilometer portage down a narrow blue bay, when Adam told me his father had written a novel.

“What, what do you mean?” Adam, as always, was sterning; in the bow, I couldn’t see his face. “Are you fucking with me?”

Adam laughed. “I knew you’d get a kick out of it. He knocked it out in the six months since he retired. He hasn’t shown it to anybody yet. I don’t think he’s going to publish it or anything.”

The waves picked up as we left the safety of the bay and entered open water. I focused on paddling, drawing the heaving water behind me with my otter-tail paddle, as Adam kept us moving in the right direction. Phil wrote a novel? My disbelief was quickly replaced by disappointment that Phil hadn’t asked me for guidance (though to be fair, he never once said anything about my own writing, so why would he suddenly reach out now?), disappointment which lasted one pull of the paddle before being taken over by a heady need to know what was in that book.

“Aren’t you dying to read it?” I got out between strokes, shouting over the wind.

“To be honest, not really. It’s just something to fill his days now that he’s no longer at the office. Besides, I know all of his stories already. Don’t you?”

For the rest of the trip, I could not get Phil’s novel out of my head. Most of my adult life, I had considered myself a writer. I had published three novels of my own, a collection of essays, but, shortly after I returned to Toronto, I had given up on that label, bid adieu to that vocation. I had wanted nothing more than to capture the absurdity and richness of the Jewish Canadian life I knew so well in fiction, but I had finally accepted that I just didn’t have it in me. All that agonizing work just wasn’t worth the meager payoff, wasn’t worth the reviewer at The Globe and Mail saying my work was “as expected and uncreative as a well-kept front lawn.” When, at my mother’s funeral, I overheard her friends gushing about the books they were reading, books with titles like My Year of Clay and Love in Afghanistan and The Baker and the Nazi’s Daughter, books that sold millions of copies, ruled the bookclub circuit for a few seasons, and would be forgotten in a hundred years, I knew it was time for an early retirement. So now here I was in Toronto, living alone in my mother’s house on the street I grew up on, teaching ESL to adults online, barely seeing anybody, stewing in alternating batches of resentment and failure.

And now I couldn’t shake the image of Phil, a white towel draping his shoulders, sweat moping his brow, hammering out a book of his own.

***

It wasn’t until a full year later that I stole the manuscript of Phil’s novel. I was at Adam’s parents’ house for the baby naming of Adam’s third child and first daughter, Rebecca. Shaking Phil’s hand after congratulating him on his eighth grandchild, I asked him jokingly about the novel. “Adam told you, did he? That was supposed to be a family secret. That fucker.” We were still shaking hands, and I had the distinct sense that this particular conversation was over.

After the ceremony, I ended up wandering upstairs, found myself in Phil’s study, which had been Adam’s teenage bedroom. I stood in the doorway, reminiscing about how much pot Adam and I smoked in there, the bong hits that launched us to the heights of epiphanic laughter. I also remembered standing in the doorway, just as I was now, one high school afternoon, talking to Adam and his girlfriend at the time; Adam had just come out of the shower and was in nothing but a purple towel, sitting on the bed, clipping his fingernails, his girlfriend sitting close. Adam was the first to have a girlfriend, the first (by many years) to have sex, and I left his house that afternoon full of jealousy and despair. I could still taste it on my tongue. Have any of my brief, glancing relationships compared to that first love?

I noticed Phil’s laptop screen was up, an old-fashioned Windows screensaver lazily bouncing around. I floated towards the computer. I clicked the mouse. There it was, right there, on the desktop. “Novel Draft Final Final.” I stared at the computer screen for a long moment, the party simmering in the living room underneath me, my mind blank, the decision already made. Heart thrashing, I opened a browser, logged into my email, and emailed the novel to myself as an attachment. I signed out, shut the computer, coughed, and left the room. Thirty minutes later I was back, double-checking I had exited my email, making sure this time to leave the screen up.

That night, I feverishly read through the novel, sitting at my mother’s kitchen table in the dark, my cup of coffee long cold beside me. This was it. This was what I had been trying to do for all those years. The novel’s characters grew up in Jewish Montreal in the sixties and seventies, moved to Toronto in the eighties, bringing with them their dramas, their prejudices, their recipes, their joys. Phil had brought the times—our times, give or take a generation—to life in ways thrilling and enlightening. And the language! Yiddish, Hebrew, French, Russian, all of it woven into the narrative subtly and expertly, with moving results. The narrative unfolded effortlessly, drawing you in, ensorcelling you with its frankness, its humanness, its depth of feeling and intellect. The only thing that wasn’t working was the title: Oh, This Blasted Communal Existence! Apparently even Phil suffered from the occasional bout of melodrama.

My first thought was that I had made the right decision to quit; none of my published novels reached this level of brilliance. Not even close.

My second thought was that I had to say something to Phil, which I quickly realized was, thanks to my drastic actions, impossible.

My third thought, followed by a guilt so heavy I had to leave the house and walk the suburban streets as they were doused in dawn light, was that I had to make his writing mine.

***

After Phil died, Adam asked me to help him sort through his books, see if there was anything I wanted. We hadn’t spoken in at least three years, but, touched that he reached out to me, I went.  In Phil’s study, I avoided looking at the laptop. Eventually, Adam in the bathroom, I opened it. The manuscript was still sitting on the desktop, still called “Novel Draft Final Final.” I pressed delete. I emptied the recycling bin. I gently closed the laptop.

What choice did I have? The novel was dazzling. I was pretty sure Adam and his siblings had never read the book; from how Phil acted the one time I broached the subject, I doubted anybody had. Who knows—maybe if I hadn’t stolen the manuscript in the first place I would have eventually started writing again, but since reading it, Phil’s novel had become a wall, a glorious, unscalable wall. And now it was nobody’s but mine. It was a risk I was willing to take—I had to share it with the world. I did a light edit, changed the title to Toronto 488, which is the posted distance on the first sign on the highway outside of Montreal; in a twinned stroke of genius, I renamed the last section, when the grandchildren of the original protagonists move to Montreal for university and live in what used to be the cold water flats of the earlier immigrant generations on St. Urbain, “Montreal 550.” Three years after Phil died, six years after I first read it, and—thanks to an excerpt in The Walrus—to some pretty intensive fanfare, Toronto 488 was released.

The following months were a blur of reading tours, interviews, synagogue talks, industry fetes. The book won all the awards I had so fruitlessly chased. The Montreal Gazette called me “the twenty-first century Mordecai Richler.” The same reviewer who loved to lambaste me in the Globe and Mail wrote that “Matthew Melnick has put away the lawnmower and gifted us with a field of prairie grass: lush, layered, vital, home to thriving, surprising life.” An astonishing number of critics used the word “astonishing.” I lapped up the attention and the accolades and the literary redemption and the reprints and the canonization. For the first time in my life, I had fans, sycophants, strangers that quickly become friends, sometimes lovers. I drank it all in. At the podium accepting the Giller, I thanked those Jewish immigrants who made the harrowing journey across the ocean and settled in Montreal. “Toronto 488, about distances crossed, about lives lived, if it’s for anybody, it’s for them.”

I never told anybody about the book’s true provenance. My relationship with Adam died; he never said anything about the success of the book. I used to wonder if he knew, but I quickly stopped caring. My place in Canadian literature was cemented; I never wrote another word of fiction. Every now and then I think of that teenaged car ride over to our friend’s kegger: the lights of the suburbs, the coming raucous night, all that undulating life in front of us. The night Phil revealed his failed desire to be a writer. Failed, past tense.

In my final days, will I fret over what I did? Will I reveal my secret? Will I repent? Ask for forgiveness? Somehow, I doubt it. For now, the awards sit on my mantel. I take up writer-in-residence posts across the continent, write forewords and afterwords, get paid thousands of dollars to lecture elderly Jews about the writing process whilst on Caribbean cruises. I have my own entry in the Jewish Encyclopaedia. Toronto 488 has been translated into thirty-five languages, all of them adorning my shelves.

And, somewhere in a drawer in my study, a handwritten note: “Fuck you very much.”


Aaron Kreuter is the author of the poetry collection Arguments for Lawn Chairs, and the short story collection You and Me, Belonging, which won the Miramichi Reader’s 2019 ‘The Very Best!’ Short Fiction Award and was shortlisted for a Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature. His second collection of poems, Shifting Baseline Syndrome, came out in March 2022, and was recently shortlisted for a Governor General’s Award for Poetry. He lives in Toronto, Canada.