Our man has been awake for three hours, although he didn't move from the bed for the first two and a half. He lay very still, afraid to wake Carrie, watching her sleep. There was a lot going on in his mind. He thought if she woke up he could tell her everything he was thinking, but there is such a thing as too much too soon. He figured it would be best if he tried to work things out on his own before he buried her in an unwanted avalanche of angst. so he eventually got up and resorted to his old friend the journal to try and work things out.

So the new problem, and it's not really new but it's now the most pressing, is that twice he has climbed into bed with Carrie, a girl he likes a lot and is sexually attracted to, and both times it has been a washout. Despite his willingness, he has not been able to stay as hard and both times intercourse has been interrupted by a wet rope of an erection. And he knows it shouldn't be this way.

As embarrassing as it is for our man, it's important that we let you know that this is not the first time the problem has surfaced; it was also an issue with Trish. It was something that he dismissed as being caused by too much drinking, because he was drinking a lot then. During the last stretch before he snapped and ran, he wanted to drink almost all the time, and he would have been drunk from the time he woke up to the time he passed out if it would have been possible.

He tied the drinking in with the problems in bed, and although they were related, there was no direct cause and effect between the two. They were both just factors of his deepening depression. Alcohol was his way of escaping the reality he was growing to hate, and as a depressant, it was making things worse. But the floppy dick trouble is another cat altogether.

Here's how it looks to him: being with Trish slowly turns from being joyful to miserable, although this is not necessarily Trish's fault. Obviously our man has problems that come from within. Along the way, he starts having difficulty finishing the job in bed. This causes problems between them. He eventually grows to dislike and even resent the whole sex act with her. He dislikes the feel of her skin against his. He's so sick of failing in bed that he doesn't want to touch her at all. And hell, why should he try and make her feel good? She just makes him suffer. Sooner or later he starts to think that he can't perform because he is just so unhappy with her that he can't be aroused by her.

As well, like with alcohol, there is a vicious cycle. You're unhappy so you drink, but drinking makes you unhappier. You're worried about having bad sex and the sex is bad because you're worried. There are a lot of little vicious cycles involved in being human.

Our man assumed that it was a problem he had with Trish, and there was no reason to think it was a problem he was going to have moving on. But there was one flaw in his reasoning. He assumed that Trish was his reason for being unhappy. It turns out he was unhappy in general.

You can imagine how distressing it is for Evans to discover that his troubles in bed are not Trish troubles, but Evans troubles. He had hoped the first time with Carrie was a fluke, but now he's seeing things the way they are. He is a twenty-three year old man in good health (although he does smoke and drink, has a poor diet and sleeps badly) who is having problems he though were reserved for Hemingway characters who took one during the war, or the elderly. But as he dwells, discussing this with himself using a pen and a notebook, he decides it is definitely not a downstairs physical problem. It is a problem with his head. Everything that is going on with him is a problem with his head.

Trish stirs, and Evans looks over at her lying on his bed. Naked, wrapped in a white cotton sheet, she looks warm and fresh and natural. He forces a smile. "Morning," he tells her.

"Hi. Been up long?"

"A while, yeah. I had to clear my head a bit. Look, I know this is sounding like a broken record, but I'm sorry about last night."

"Oh, I don't care," she says. "I came. You give good head." Then she stretches, reaching her arms up and the sheet slides down, revealing her upper body. Evans feels a stirring in his boxers, a physical response to the sight of the beautiful naked girl stretching and yawning in front of him. A dependable morning hard-on? A morning shag, maybe? No. Better not risk a third embarrassment.

"What are you doing?" she asks, sitting up and wrapping the sheet around her, tucking it in at the front like a long white towel.

"Just doing some writing."

"Are you a writer?"

"No, I just keep a journal. Old habit."

She gets up and comes over to the table. In a stack against the wall is the pile of journal notebooks that Evans brought with him to Toronto. It seems silly to him, really. What did he pack when he left his entire life behind? Two changes of clothes, a razor, a toothbrush, and ten years worth of old paper.

She sits down. "Can I look at them?" she asks, and he pauses to think. He hasn't shared them with anyone before. Not even Trish. She was too close to be allowed into his last secret place, the world inside his head that he made representations of in scrapbook journals. But with Carrie it doesn't matter. She doesn't know him very much at all. And somehow that makes it okay for her to look.

"Sure," he says at last. "Go ahead."

She reaches into the stack and pulls a notebook out from the middle. He knows it immediately. He was using that one during his first year at university. What's in it? Lots of classroom musings, quotations from professors, sketches of people he met, song lyrics that lodged in his head, found text that seemed like poetry, parables that he had intended to be deep and philosophical but were sweetly naive and immature. Magazine clippings, newspaper fragments about eroding human rights at home and abroad. And woven through it all, the personal narrative of a young man trying to figure out who he is as he realizes how small his world had been up until then.

Sitting watching her flip through his private thoughts makes him feel anxious, open to embarrassment. "Do you want some coffee?" he asks, and without waiting for her to answer, he gets up and puts water on to boil. "I only have instant, if that's cool."

"Yeah, sure, it doesn't matter," Carrie replies, not looking up. She pulls another book from the stack and flips through it, moves on to another, and then another. "How long have you been keeping these?"

"Since I was twelve."

"You're kidding. Where are the ones from then?" She starts searching through the stack.

"Those ones are long gone. I think the earliest one I have there is from when I was fifteen."

"Why did you start? You just wanted to keep a diary?"

He slides open the kitchen window and lights a cigarette. "No, because of my grandpa, actually." He pauses while taking a drag, wondering if he ever told Trish this story. "I used to spend summers at the lake with my grandparents, and during the day my grandpa would drive me into this small town, and we'd sit in the cafe all day."

"Why?"

"Grandpa used to be a novelist. He wrote paperback novels back, I don't even know when, like in the sixties. Some of them got published, and he made a living doing it for a few years, but he was going broke and Grandma made him stop and get a proper job. So he sold farm insurance for the next thirty years. When he retired he wanted to write again but he didn't want to tell Grandma, so he would tell her he was going to have coffee with his old clients. He would head to this cafe, drink coffee and eat pie and write on these tablets of lined paper. And he would do it a few times a week, even in the summer when I was visiting."

"Not much fun for you, I would guess."

"Yeah. I would be twelve years old, sitting looking out the window across the highway at the woods. I just wanted to run around in the trees and play army, you know? He would try and get me to read, but I'd get bored, so he started making me write too. I would bring comic books and copy the drawings, and write little adventure stories, all kinds of shit like that. I don't know. After doing it for a couple summers I started doing it in school notebooks during the year. It just became a habit."

"That's an amazing story," she says. "Is your Grandpa still alive?"

"No. Kidneys, then the liver."

"Oh. I'm sorry." She's quiet for a moment. "These are amazing," she tells him."They're so natural. A lot of artists keep sketchbooks, right? And a lot of them fill their books with stuff like this, clippings and drawing and writing. They expect that people will want to see their books, so they treat them like art projects. But these seem really unpretentious. Really unintentional."

"Unintentional?"

"Well, like you weren't intending them to be shared or displayed, you were just keeping a journal and this is what goes into it. It's just really cool."

"Well, that's what it is. They're journals. Not art projects."

She flips open some of the older books and spreads them out on the table next to more recent ones. "You can see your style developing over time. Even your handwriting changes. God, I could spend all day with these."

"You've only been looking at them for two minutes."

She pauses, looks at him, and a guilty smile appears on her face. "You're right. I'm being a freak. Sorry."

"Don't be. Do you take anything in your coffee? Because I don't have anything. I wasn't expecting company."

"That's fine. Look, Evans, I know you just keep these as a journal, but what would you think about putting them in a show?"

Our man looks at Carrie. "In a show? Where?"

"I don't know. In a gallery, or at some other art presentation. I think they're really neat. People would like to see them. I don't have anything specific in mind, but I talk to people all the time about shows and things like this. If I found something that was appropriate, would you be interested in showing them?"

Evans crushes out his cigarette. Art show. Art gallery. "Maybe," he says.

"Well, keep it in mind."

They drink their black instant coffee and Carrie gets dressed. They make plans to meet again, kiss at the door, and she leaves. Alone again, Evans closes the window and crawls back onto his bed. With the images of naked Carrie stretching in front of him in his mind he tries to get hard, wanting to bring himself off and prove that he's still physically capable. Images of Trish keeps popping into his mind's eye at the wrong moment, and after fifteen minutes of frustration he rolls off the bed and gets dressed.