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His loneliness was something that shone from him like light. It was an exquisite loneliness, almost refined. It was a gift; he had been born with it, and it was something that the world could never take from him. He possessed nothing but this thrilling loneliness, and he guarded it with a passion, sharing it only with the blue bicycle in whom he confided all his secrets.

Now thirteen, he had gotten into the habit of peering into peoples' windows at night, his awful pale little face pressed against the panes, his eyes searching for something con-tained in their secret lives. He couldn't have given a name to what he was looking for.

When he was very young, every day had been a birthday he celebrated in a thousand ways, every moment had been a hole into which he dropped joys and terrors, bizarre adventures. He dreamed he threw himself over Niagara Falls in a barrel, he walked across the Grand Canyon on a tightrope, he sat on the top of a flagpole eating nothing but raisins and sunflower seeds, defying the world, he flung himself through one of the windows at Casa Loma, brandishing a sword and proclaiming to the dancers on the ballroom floor that he was the man in the iron mask. He composed music and played baseball, he was a computer programmer, an astronaut, and he was Darth Vader when all the boys were Skywalker because he preferred the dark side of everything. But now, under the helmet of darkness, his face was brooding and pale. He had become the nightchild, that's what people called him.

It was all because of the night of the rich kid's birthday party. The night of the magician.

The rich kid's family threw a huge party for their son and hired a real live magician to come and perform some tricks. And the magician was wonderful to behold, with eyes that changed colour as you looked at him, and dark reddish-brown hair, and a cape that moved even when he wasn't moving. As he stood there in his dark remote glory, words slowly formed in the child's mind, words which were wordless, words belonging to a superior language he had not yet learned: Perfect Coordinator of All the Worlds, Emperor of Fire and Water, Magus, Lord of Excellent Lies.

All during the magician's performance he had felt that he was the only one in the room who understood what the magician was really doing - for he wasn't doing 'tricks,' he was doing something else, something more important and unnerving than anyone knew. When he produced fire he invented fire. When the silks were pulled from his wand they were a river of miracles. The other kids laughed, and he hated them. Magic was not a laughing matter, magic was dead serious.

Somehow no one had thought to provide a screen or a curtain for the magician to go behind after he had finished his show, to put away his equipment in privacy. So he had to stand in the bare light in the centre of the room with all his props spread out in naked disarray on the table before him. The child didn't know it, but the magician was inwardly cursing those responsible for this oversight. Luckily, most of the kids had dispersed to other parts of the house, leaving him alone to perform the extremely secret ritual of packing up his equipment in preparation for a future performance. The way in which a magician puts away his wonders is as important as the way in which he brings them out. The slightest little wisp of material had to be folded just so; every single piece of equipment had its own intricate and delicate position with respect to every other piece. It was a long and intricate task, one which the magician had done a hundred times before -- but always alone, always in complete privacy.

He thought he was alone now, but suddenly the child was right there in front of him, his luminous little face turned up towards him in terrified adoration.

'I'll help you pack up, sir. I'll do anything -- just tell me what to do.'

'No one can help me do what I do,' said the magician, smiling grimly. 'Absolutely no one.'

'But I can make it faster for you, I know I can! '

'No one can make it faster for me.'

He watched, bewildered, as the magician took forever to fold up a flourescent orange square of silk. Why did it take him so long? Surely this was the easiest part of his work. Why didn't he just stash everything away and fly off to whatever distant part of the galaxy he had come from, whatever world that glowed red and gold in the light of its several suns?

'Please let me help you,' he pleaded.

'Get lost, you twit,' said the magician.

It was then that the sky cracked into a thousand pieces and fell onto the child's head. Reality took a sharp turn to the left; nothing would ever be the same again. Life, he decided then and there, was a big lie. Life could get lost, life could take a walk.

'You're Chinese,' he told the magician. That was the big insult of the year.

'If you say so,' said the magician. 'But in the fullness of time you will understand. In the fullness of time, or maybe tomor-row at noon. Whatever.'

'Give me that wand. Or I'll tell everybody what I saw here, how you stand here for hours folding everything, getting it all ready, how magic is a pile of shit.' He grabbed the wand.

'Give that back!' the magician yelled, and lunged for him. The sudden movement jarred the table and a number of props fell onto the floor. He held the child's wrist in an iron grip and they vied for control of the magic sceptre.

'I'll show you how to make yourself invisible if you give me that back,' said the magician. 'It's a matter of bending light. I'll show you.'

'Fuck off.' The child's wiry strength allowed him to wiggle free. He kicked the magician in the shin and ran for the door.

'You'll regret this!' the magician cried. 'Anyway, that wand is just another prop. It won't work for you.'

'So why do you care then if I've got it or not?' the child sneered. 'What's it to you?'

He got away with the wand and left the magician standing there in the naked light, folding, folding. He looked back once, and the fabulous cape that had first seemed to possess a life of its own had re-arranged itself in limp and lifeless folds.

Outside, he tried to do something with the wand, but it didn't work. He waved it around in circles high over his head, he blew on it and whispered wild incantations, he stroked it and pleaded with it and jumped on it, he dipped it in soft earth and in water, he stole some matches and passed it through fire, but nothing happened. So it's a dud, he thought. Just like him. He kept it anyway.

Now he peered into people's windows, his face, pale as clay, pressed against the glass panes of their lives, looking for some-thing he couldn't name, for its name belonged to a superior language he had not yet learned.

Magus.

Lord of Excellent Lies.

Whenever Noman saw the boy, day was just turning into night, so it was neither one thing nor the other but a place in space and time that belonged to the two of them alone. The place had its own rules, its own laws. And there were always fireworks.

The first time was the Twenty-Fourth of May, and he had slept for part of the afternoon and had exhausting dreams which culminated in something he called the voice of sleep. Its messages had the disorder -- or the magical order -- of all dreams. You've got this cap on your brain, this helmet of bone, this bonnet of steel, this skull to contain your immortal soul, this crown of folly, this nightcap, this cranium that contains the sum total of all you have ever learned. He told the voice to shut up; it went on: If you should die before you wake, pray the Lord your soul to take, otherwise you're in big trouble. What is a logarithm and who cares? Who built the great pyramid at Giza and why? Who are you?

He opened his eyes and saw the orange curtains gathering light. He lay in bed awhile in the warm compromise between sleep and consciousness, then got up and moved around in the daze of the afternoon. What should he wear? He distrusted all his clothes. Did this matter? Eight zillion Chinese didn't care what he wore. Nothing mattered, everything mattered; it was Monday. He put on a dark green sweater and wondered what today was all about -- this dead queen's birthday. (The queen of what, the queen of where?) Later at dusk he went to Kali's place where people were gathered in the back yard handing out sparklers. Roman candles had been launched like minia-ture spacecraft and were proceeding to destinations in minor galaxies. Multi-coloured sparks, space-rain, fell back behind them and disappeared in the dark grass. Kali, wrote Kali with a sparkler across the sky. Kalikalikal.

His sparkler smelled like sulphur and nitro-glycerine and pine trees and summer campfires. 'Just when you get to the last letter the first one starts to disappear,' said Kali. 'So if you want to see your whole name you have to write faster and faster and over and over, but there's never one point where you'll get it all down at once.'

Noman, he wrote across the sky. Nomanomanoma.

The back yard was ablaze with children and animals and Pinwheels and Burning Schoolhouses. They went inside to find peace, and discovered the TV talking to itself, telling itself the news, then: 'These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its mission: to seek out new worlds, to boldly go where no man has gone before ...'

Kali switched channels. 'What's wrong with you?' she asked him, for his face was suddenly drained of colour, and he had broken out into a cold sweat.

'There's a boy,' he said, 'peering in the window. He's got this pale face and this terrible grin.'

'He's not there now,' Kali said.

'There was a boy out there. A boy looking in.'

'It was probably the nightchild, that's what we call him around here,' she said with a light laugh.

'Who's he?'

'He's a haunted little kid, a real loner. In summer you can see him frying ants on the sidewalk with a magnifying glass.'

'Don't all kids do that?'

'Yes. But then he eats them. He also draws demons all over the Bible.'

'He was horrible, and luminous. He just stared and grinned.'

'He does that to everybody,' Kali said.

'No, it's different with me. He's seen me before. He's seen me naked. Now he's doing it again, stripping me, exposing me.'

'You're taking him too seriously. Kids don't have that much insight.'

'Insight! He's got x-ray vision, he's got laser light coming out of his eyes. For him the whole world is his private holo-gram.'

'You're unravelling,' Kali said.

'No I'm not. It's just that I see ghosts everywhere because everything is haunted, everything. Everybody is haunting everybody else. The whole planet is haunted. And now this kid is going to start flitting in and out and around the corners of my vision like an evil little cherub. Do you know what the definition of a cherub is? A child with many wings and a body full of eyes.' He smiled and added grimly, 'When you deal with me, you deal with angels.'

The child's next visitation was on Kanada Day. People milled around the parliament buildings eating five-cent hotdogs and wearing hats that read: I'M HOOKED ON KANADA. Noman and Kali watched TV, and the eloquent box showed a musician in an Indian musical group looking up from his sitar, his coal-black eyebrows locked together in the middle of his forehead. 'Well folks -- goodnight for today!' he stammered. 'Any interested bodies should call our program.' The camera started to leave him alone, then changed its mind and lingered on his face. Beads of sweat broke out on his brow. He signed off again, eyebrows knotted in despair. A girl beside him wiped her forehead in an abstract way and smeared her red dot horizontally across it. War paint, thought Kali, now she's a red Indian. On another channel they learned that Anne Murray was at home in Springhill entertaining her friends and relatives, and Buffy Sainte Marie was at Broken Hand reserve in Manitoba. Then:

-- Ottawa -- Parliament Hill. An anonymous hand waves at the country, the palm slowly approaching the camera until the screen is blocked out. Screen clears to reveal an enormous Maple Leaf in front of which Ukrainian dancers whirl and twirl.

-- P.E.I. A little boy sings something in slow, dark Gaelic.

-- Montreal. Somebody sings 'tu es mon chanson . . . '

-- Yellowknife. The midnight sun high in the sky, Indian dancers with horn-rimmed glasses describe slow circles to the beat of the drums, the drums.

-- Ottawa. The whole world is on stage in a thousand costumes. Norwegians lean into the wind, impervious to the rain and chill. Armenians dance in a mad swirl of colours. The flags of a thousand nations lose control. 'China!' screams the announcer, and China makes a brief appearance. 'Taiwan!' and Taiwan emerges like magic from behind the Maple Leaf. 'Scotland! Denmark! Lithuania! Germany! Finland! France! Switzerland! Austria! '

'What nationality is the kid we saw? ' Noman asked.

'The nightchild? Oh nothing, I guess he's just Kanadian,' Kali said.

And then it happened. The fireworks started to go off at Ontario Place, and the air took on the indistinct purple haze of dusk. Without turning around, he knew the boy was there at the window, and when he did turn, he saw the feverishly bright eyes and the purple light casting shadows on the auburn hair. The boy seemed to be waving something at him, something like a stick or a cane, and his mouth was open in a wide, mocking smile.

'Who is that kid? I'm going to kill that kid!' he screamed, and bolted for the door. But he wasn't fast enough; the horrible child laughed and vanished.

'If we pay too much attention to him we'll give him the evil eye,' Kali said.

'If that means we'll curse him, I already have.'

'It doesn't mean that. In the East if you compliment or pay too much attention to a child you put him in grave danger. That's what those little blue amulets are for -- to reflect the Eye back on itself. You may not wish evil, but your praise or attention attracts it. So flattery in itself is a kind of evil, I suppose.'

'I hate kids. I think I was one once,' Noman said, and his voice trailed off sadly.

'You men,' Kali smiled, 'you are all looking for your fathers.'

The thin, piping voices of the children of a thousand lands on Parliament Hill rose for Oh Kanada. He turned back to the window, but it was a dark rectangle of silence like the TV which Kali switched off. Then the children fell silent, the Indians withdrew, the Latvians and Estonians receded into that strange country behind the Maple Leaf. The last images on the screen were the bright signatures of the fireworks against the sky.

Daymares, he thought, are much worse than nightmares, and that is why one should avoid sleeping by day. Nevertheless he slept in late one morning, and the dreadful dreams began. The child burned in his head and hurled vulgarities at him and ran after him, laughing. Sometimes he was chalk-white; other times he was black. Sometimes he wore feathers on his head like an Indian chief or an Incan king; other times he wore a metal helmet and his laugh had a hellish, sepulchral sound.

Then the child rode his blue bicycle over the rim of the world, and he awoke.

Children were all mad, he told himself later that day as he walked through the park. They talked to themselves all the time, giving themselves crazy instructions, reciting ancient chants. Either that or they lurched around like drunkards. When they played together it was like watching the rituals of a secret society. (May I take one giant step? Yes you may.) And they were not good or bad or anything -- they were transparent.

He got onto a streetcar at King Street and there were a few boys of twelve or thirteen in the back seat. One of them came down the aisle and stood beside him.

He knew immediately who it was.

'Hey you -- do you want to see what I found?' the boy asked.

Then he held out the wand.

'Give me that thing,' he said in a low voice, avoiding the boy's eyes.

'No way. It's mine. I found it.'

'You didn't find it, you stole it. Years ago, you stole it. I remember.'

'Who says I should give it to you, you slob?'

'I say.'

The boy lit a match.

'Dynamite!' somebody screamed. People turned around and started to make little shrieking noises. That morning it had been reported on the news that a large amount of dynamite had been lost or dumped somewhere at this end of the city, and the police were afraid of it falling into the hands of children.

Noman seized the match and blew it out, then grabbed onto the wand and tried to wrench it away from the boy. 'Give me that goddamn wand!' he yelled.

Now there was pandemonium on the streetcar. The driver stopped to let everyone out, and the boy slithered away before he could reach him. Noman squeezed through the crowd and chased the boy down a side street and into a lane. He cornered him in front of a yellow garage, and they stared at one another in fury.

'I hate your guts,' said the boy. 'You turd. You troll.'

'In the fullness of time you will understand. In the fullness of time, or maybe tomorrow at noon. Whatever.' Noman said, and wondered what he meant. 'Meanwhile, give me the wand, because now it really is dynamite.'

'Like Hell it is. It's a dud, just like you. You want it so much -- here, take it!' He threw the wand at Noman, then he swung around and headed down the lane in a swift, strangely unchildlike stride.

Noman had just enough time to step back to avoid having the thing explode in his face. When the explosion came and the wand fell, blackened and smoking at his feet, the boy turned back. He looked puzzled at first, then he broke out into wild, cruel laughter, turned a corner in the lane and disap-peered.

Bad timing, Noman thought. Must get my act together. He picked up the wand, folded it, and put it inside his jacket. By the time he got to where he was going it was dusk, and thundery. A greasy sort of rain came down, and in the peagreen light the asphalt on the roads darkened to the slick wicked black of the mask of Lord Darth Vader.

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