Dead Voices, page 24
“Not true. We work hard for our families. Our families are the greatest value of our lives. As well as our beliefs and principles.”
“We have to open our eyes. We’re not aware yet that the god of retail has triumphed over all the other gods. The fight now is not between terrorists and capitalists. It’s between the old gods and the new god. And the old gods will not go down without a fight.”
“You’re crazy, Z.”
“True, I am crazy,” Z said. “But a nation of shoppers will always lose that fight.”
“You’re not speaking our language,” Vito said, looking around at the older gents. “We’ve spent our lives working hard and raising our families. We don’t wanna hear about this other crap. We just wanna live out the rest of our lives in peace and health.”
“Yeah, right. We’ve worked hard, but only to raise a generation of shoppers. Our children aren’t equipped with knowledge and higher values. They only know how to shop.”
“What can we do, then?”
“Use the wisdom of our age. We can teach the young their enslavement to retail and the visible. We can form senior cadres. Educate the young on what’s essential, on what to buy and not to buy, on how to be open to knowledge and the power of the invisible. When that doesn’t work, we can roll up our sleeves and become retail resistors. Go on hunger strikes. Form sit-downs in front of the shops and stores. Get arrested and noticed. Re-empower the spirit with soul-force. Put ourselves at risk to free our kids and grandkids.”
A few of the older gents had congregated around them in a tight mass and didn’t seem amused by their discourse.
“Excuse me, sir,” a tall guy said. He was commanding in his presence even with his wispy white hair and portly figure. “With all due respect, I see you are a man of distinction. But what’s going on here? Are you a security guy under cover? Why are you speaking like this? Are we on TV? Or is this a joke of some kind?”
Z looked up at him. He was nattily dressed in a flowered short-sleeve shirt and dress pants hitched high on his waist. Though his broad face had signs of age, his eyes were firm and grim, as if he didn’t suffer fools too easily.
“I’m not a security guy,” Z said, “though I have your security in mind. And the only joke is this mall.”
“What’re you saying?” the guy said, peering at him with narrow eyes.
Z presented his views. The older gentleman, who gave his name as Don Carlo, listened politely, nodding his head every so often.
“This isn’t a place of worship at all,” Don Carlo said with a grim expression. “Any fool can see that. And who are you to come here into our mall and tell us such things?”
“We’re just shoppers like you,” Z said.
“If you’re a shopper, you have to abide by the rules of a shopper.”
Vito smiled at him. “Oh, yeah? What rules?”
Don Carlo nodded, as if addressing an underling. “Don’t be uppity, my friend.” He gave Vito closer scrutiny. “Don’t I know you? Aren’t you the barber on the other side of City Hall?”
“Yeah, I’m a barber, but I’m also a shopper. And who’re you?”
“You see these older gentlemen here,” Don Carlo said, indicating the guys standing close to him. “We’re the unofficial guardians of this mall. This is our second home. Our piazza and sports bar and community centre. And we don’t like strangers coming here and breaking the rules, understand. If you had come to us and asked us to speak, that’s different. You would’ve shown us honour. But you didn’t do that, did you?”
Z could see that Vito was no longer smiling. Indeed, Don Carlo’s assured and commanding voice belied his innocuous appearance.
“Enzo,” Don Carlo said to smaller older gentleman beside him, “give them some of the mall rules.”
Enzo, with bald pate and a booming voice, spoke as if through a megaphone.
“The mall is your second home; honour it accordingly. Don’t buy anything you can’t afford. Every day is a shopping day. You must not shoplift. You must not harm or dishonour a fellow shopper. All shoppers are equal. Treat every shopper with respect. Make your shopping day pleasant for yourself and all the people who work here.”
More people congregated around them. A thick crowd of faces edged closer to the table.
Vito’s face tightened with alarm. He told Don Carlo they weren’t in the mall to make trouble. He said he knew Z from his hair-cutting time at the university, where Z was a professor, that he was a very knowledgeable guy who had lived alone in the bush in the north for a long time and had come back to share his knowledge with all shoppers. They were just shoppers like everyone else — no better, no worse. And as a barber as well, no matter his age, he was still listening and learning. They had heard the rules. They hadn’t broken any rules. Besides, if these older gents were mall guardians where were their badges?
“Badges?” Don Carlo said with incredulity. “What badges?”
“Badges of mall security.”
Z put his arm in front of Vito and took command.
“Did you guys make up those rules?” Z said, with a smile.
“Yes, we did.”
“And who gave you the authority?”
“We gave ourselves the authority. And we have the power to enforce them as well. We don’t need any badges, I’ll tell you that. And if you really wanted to help us out, what you’d do is help out the kids and adults who work here as sales associates for minimum wage. The kids can get along, but single moms and others can’t raise a family on such a wage.”
“Let’s get outta here,” Vito said.
Before they could get up, however, a couple of real security guys in black uniforms came over and dispersed the crowd. They were young stocky guys with buzz cuts who looked like military personnel with no nonsense stares. One of them was brown, the other white. They looked down at Z and Vito as if about to put the cuffs on them.
“Whatta you guys doing?” the brown guy said, arching his brows in incredulity.
“Is it a crime to talk?” Vito said.
“It’s a crime to impede business,” the white guy said.
“We’re drawing people in, not chasing them away.”
“Look,” the white guy said, “we’re not here to argue. Now, take your coffees and go.”
As they walked down the concourse, Vito was shaking his head.
“Man, I can’t believe that mafioso,” Vito said. “He thinks he owns the mall now.”
“At least people are listening,” Z said.
“Yeah, but we don’t want to end up in the lake with our feet in concrete.”
“Don’t get melodramatic. I just don’t feel comfortable in this suit, though. I have to get something I feel comfortable in, Vito, or it’s no use.”
They passed an upscale designer shop.
“Okay, let’s go in here and get you some new duds.”
In the change-room Z took off his suit and tried on some fashionable polo shirts as well as casual slacks. Finally he settled on a nicely knit short-sleeve polo shirt, sporty and casual, along with slim and elegant trousers. He kept his Italian shoes on.
“You feel comfortable now?” Vito asked him when he came out.
He looked at himself in the full-length mirror.
“I’m getting there.”
As it turned out, Z and Vito weren’t intimidated by the senior mafia guys. They came back to the mall on the slower days when Vito could leave his shop unattended. The security personnel knew them by sight. Surveillance cameras could spot them as soon as they entered. They had to use more subtle means of persuasion. Instead of sitting down at coffee shops and food courts, for example, they had to pretend to be shopping, go into actual stores, and speak to individuals or small groups, as if engaging in casual conversation.
Of course, the upshot was that they had to buy a few things to make it look good. One day Vito bought some grooming aids for men. Another day he bought shoes, slacks, underwear. Once he went whole hog and bought a nice watch. Z got some good walking shorts and a nice pair of training shoes. All that walking on mall concourses was taking its toll on his feet, which had been sorely tested during his days of wearing snow shoes. He also got extra slacks and tops, along with some crazy designer T-shirts that reminded him of his lecturing days in torn T-shirts.
“You’re getting to be a regular shopper, aren’t you?” Vito said one day.
“If it’s the only way to reach the shoppers, what can I say? The gnosis is useless if it’s not heard or ignored. What good is your barber shop if there are no customers? Knowledge may be for the few, but wisdom has to be for the many.”
“You’re right. I gotta get the business back up on its feet.”
“Nothing wrong in shopping and business per se,” he said. “We all have to make a living, after all. It’s how we do it that counts.”
“Right. I’m a barber. It’s what I do.”
“And you’re a good barber, Vito. You look after the interests of your customers. Not only do you cut hair, but you listen to the ills of the world and absolve all sin.”
“Geez, if I knew that, I woulda charged extra.”
In time, however, Z had to modify his message. The shoppers just didn’t get it. Either he was speaking over their heads or at cross-purposes to who they were and their state of mind. They could’ve been devout Muslims or born-again Christians or observant Jews. They could’ve been Hindus or Baptists or fervent Catholics. Or entirely secular and indifferent to any belief and full-time consumers. It wasn’t like the apocalyptic times of old when the ears were open and the hearts were sick. When the people were anxious for redemption. And the few who received ecstatic messages and inspiration were looked up to as prophets. It was the time of deception and opinion. It was the time of egalité and prosperity — and the power of plastic. Who wanted to hear about subduing shopping when the god of the mall ruled?
The only way he could reach them, he found from trial and error, was to get into the same shopping mood as they were. And to get into that mood, he had not only to talk their language but actually be in their head-space as well, as Vito had advised him from the very beginning. He had to be a real shopper, even an über-shopper. He had to speak to them about brand names, go gaga over designer labels, feel the rush of retail therapy after making a good purchase, joke with the clerks at the various stores, soak up the mall odour, breathe the controlled air, and actually walk down the concourse not like a Cynic-dog but like a cardinal in the cathedral of retail.
Eventually he also made up with the mall mafia of seniors, began to talk to them about ways of unionizing the mall workers. Don Carlo, who had once been a mayor of a small town in Sicily, appreciated his ideas. They even modified the mall rules to include items that encouraged shoppers to be less addicted to shopping. Don Carlo asked him to make suggestions to change the décor of the concourses, make them more aesthetic and homier. Maybe even capture the old-world charm of the piazzas in Europe. He had the ear of the mall manager, he said.
Sometimes he and Vito went to the movie theatre complex on the west side of the megamall. They saw the same movies the shoppers were seeing, the family movies with computer-animated figures and the super-hero movies with the ear-splitting sound tracks and mind-numbing special effects. There was nothing, it seemed, the movies couldn’t do on the screen to create a fantasy world. They could make an ordinary Joe into a super-hero or demi-god, make as if the whole planet was destroyed by a meteor, offer up the latest fashions in clothes and cool, show the vast vistas of space, and recreate the stories of the Bible as if they were real-life occurrences.
Metaphor and myth were dead — and only the literal lived. It was as if the comics had come back to life. In one movie they had seen of Noah and the flood, it wasn’t just the constant rain that produced the deluge. The earth had opened up, as if by divine intervention, and geysers had sprouted and the waters had consumed all living things, all done in the ear-shattering music of audio-power. When they came out, they both had headaches from the loud sound track, feeling as if pulverized into insensate consumers.
“Is that what the kids are all seeing?” Vito asked him.
“It’s the medication of the masses,” he said, shaking his head.
It was difficult to get his bearings after watching these movies. He was far from his cabin in the bush, away from the silence of his own thoughts, away from the gods of the air and the earth, and ever farther away from the pneuma and the gnosis.
How could he fight against the fantastic spectacles of the movie screen? How could he bark louder than the techno-amplified sound tracks? How could he lead the people out of their enslavement to the flesh and the mall? They had been medicated beyond redemption.
The more time he spent in the mall, the less he felt different from the other shoppers. He was no better, after all. They could’ve been his former students. And in order to get across to the kids he had to be a kid. Vito had been right all along. What was the use of being a watchdog if no one understood your bark anymore?
The shoppers just went their merry way, oblivious of all his barking. And if they wanted to graze in the low valleys instead of the high mountains, who were you to think yourself superior to them?
Maybe he was the one who was self-delusional. Maybe he was the one who falsely thought he had been commissioned. Maybe he had heard a false call. What did he have to offer the shoppers, after all? He couldn’t lead them out of their slavery to shopping to a promised land flowing with milk and honey. He couldn’t convince them of the freedom of the pneuma and the gnosis when they were firmly convinced they were free to buy anything they wanted.
Who would want to go into the desert and risk starvation and death? The kingdoms of the world were already there in the mall, ready for the picking, he could see. And the price to pay for giving up the mall was too high.
As a good shopper, Z had become alerted to all the prices. He had heard the voice of the mall shoppers through the rules of the older gentlemen-guardians and in his sleep. There was only one god, the god of the mall, and it would defeat all the other gods. As shoppers, they were to honour its sales every day of the week. They would take care of the mall and the mall would take care of them. They would only buy what they could afford. Not everyone could shop at the high-end stores. Everyone had to find their appropriate level of shopping. If Dollarama worked for them, then let it be Dollarama. When they were ready for Dolce & Gabbana and Holt Renfrew, they’d know soon enough.
All Z could do now was bide his time in the mall. Be a shopper like all the rest.
And dress in ready-to-wear.
About the Author
F.G. Paci is the author of 13 novels and 3 collections of short stories. He is best known for Black Madonna, a novel that deals with feminist issues and the immigrant experience in Canada. His eighth novel in his BLACK BLOOD series is The Son (Oberon, 2011). The last two novels in the series remain to be published. His two previous collections of short stories were Playing to Win (Guernica, 2012) and Talk About God (Guernica, 2016). He lives in Toronto with his wife and has one grown-up son.
F.G. Paci, Dead Voices
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“We have to open our eyes. We’re not aware yet that the god of retail has triumphed over all the other gods. The fight now is not between terrorists and capitalists. It’s between the old gods and the new god. And the old gods will not go down without a fight.”
“You’re crazy, Z.”
“True, I am crazy,” Z said. “But a nation of shoppers will always lose that fight.”
“You’re not speaking our language,” Vito said, looking around at the older gents. “We’ve spent our lives working hard and raising our families. We don’t wanna hear about this other crap. We just wanna live out the rest of our lives in peace and health.”
“Yeah, right. We’ve worked hard, but only to raise a generation of shoppers. Our children aren’t equipped with knowledge and higher values. They only know how to shop.”
“What can we do, then?”
“Use the wisdom of our age. We can teach the young their enslavement to retail and the visible. We can form senior cadres. Educate the young on what’s essential, on what to buy and not to buy, on how to be open to knowledge and the power of the invisible. When that doesn’t work, we can roll up our sleeves and become retail resistors. Go on hunger strikes. Form sit-downs in front of the shops and stores. Get arrested and noticed. Re-empower the spirit with soul-force. Put ourselves at risk to free our kids and grandkids.”
A few of the older gents had congregated around them in a tight mass and didn’t seem amused by their discourse.
“Excuse me, sir,” a tall guy said. He was commanding in his presence even with his wispy white hair and portly figure. “With all due respect, I see you are a man of distinction. But what’s going on here? Are you a security guy under cover? Why are you speaking like this? Are we on TV? Or is this a joke of some kind?”
Z looked up at him. He was nattily dressed in a flowered short-sleeve shirt and dress pants hitched high on his waist. Though his broad face had signs of age, his eyes were firm and grim, as if he didn’t suffer fools too easily.
“I’m not a security guy,” Z said, “though I have your security in mind. And the only joke is this mall.”
“What’re you saying?” the guy said, peering at him with narrow eyes.
Z presented his views. The older gentleman, who gave his name as Don Carlo, listened politely, nodding his head every so often.
“This isn’t a place of worship at all,” Don Carlo said with a grim expression. “Any fool can see that. And who are you to come here into our mall and tell us such things?”
“We’re just shoppers like you,” Z said.
“If you’re a shopper, you have to abide by the rules of a shopper.”
Vito smiled at him. “Oh, yeah? What rules?”
Don Carlo nodded, as if addressing an underling. “Don’t be uppity, my friend.” He gave Vito closer scrutiny. “Don’t I know you? Aren’t you the barber on the other side of City Hall?”
“Yeah, I’m a barber, but I’m also a shopper. And who’re you?”
“You see these older gentlemen here,” Don Carlo said, indicating the guys standing close to him. “We’re the unofficial guardians of this mall. This is our second home. Our piazza and sports bar and community centre. And we don’t like strangers coming here and breaking the rules, understand. If you had come to us and asked us to speak, that’s different. You would’ve shown us honour. But you didn’t do that, did you?”
Z could see that Vito was no longer smiling. Indeed, Don Carlo’s assured and commanding voice belied his innocuous appearance.
“Enzo,” Don Carlo said to smaller older gentleman beside him, “give them some of the mall rules.”
Enzo, with bald pate and a booming voice, spoke as if through a megaphone.
“The mall is your second home; honour it accordingly. Don’t buy anything you can’t afford. Every day is a shopping day. You must not shoplift. You must not harm or dishonour a fellow shopper. All shoppers are equal. Treat every shopper with respect. Make your shopping day pleasant for yourself and all the people who work here.”
More people congregated around them. A thick crowd of faces edged closer to the table.
Vito’s face tightened with alarm. He told Don Carlo they weren’t in the mall to make trouble. He said he knew Z from his hair-cutting time at the university, where Z was a professor, that he was a very knowledgeable guy who had lived alone in the bush in the north for a long time and had come back to share his knowledge with all shoppers. They were just shoppers like everyone else — no better, no worse. And as a barber as well, no matter his age, he was still listening and learning. They had heard the rules. They hadn’t broken any rules. Besides, if these older gents were mall guardians where were their badges?
“Badges?” Don Carlo said with incredulity. “What badges?”
“Badges of mall security.”
Z put his arm in front of Vito and took command.
“Did you guys make up those rules?” Z said, with a smile.
“Yes, we did.”
“And who gave you the authority?”
“We gave ourselves the authority. And we have the power to enforce them as well. We don’t need any badges, I’ll tell you that. And if you really wanted to help us out, what you’d do is help out the kids and adults who work here as sales associates for minimum wage. The kids can get along, but single moms and others can’t raise a family on such a wage.”
“Let’s get outta here,” Vito said.
Before they could get up, however, a couple of real security guys in black uniforms came over and dispersed the crowd. They were young stocky guys with buzz cuts who looked like military personnel with no nonsense stares. One of them was brown, the other white. They looked down at Z and Vito as if about to put the cuffs on them.
“Whatta you guys doing?” the brown guy said, arching his brows in incredulity.
“Is it a crime to talk?” Vito said.
“It’s a crime to impede business,” the white guy said.
“We’re drawing people in, not chasing them away.”
“Look,” the white guy said, “we’re not here to argue. Now, take your coffees and go.”
As they walked down the concourse, Vito was shaking his head.
“Man, I can’t believe that mafioso,” Vito said. “He thinks he owns the mall now.”
“At least people are listening,” Z said.
“Yeah, but we don’t want to end up in the lake with our feet in concrete.”
“Don’t get melodramatic. I just don’t feel comfortable in this suit, though. I have to get something I feel comfortable in, Vito, or it’s no use.”
They passed an upscale designer shop.
“Okay, let’s go in here and get you some new duds.”
In the change-room Z took off his suit and tried on some fashionable polo shirts as well as casual slacks. Finally he settled on a nicely knit short-sleeve polo shirt, sporty and casual, along with slim and elegant trousers. He kept his Italian shoes on.
“You feel comfortable now?” Vito asked him when he came out.
He looked at himself in the full-length mirror.
“I’m getting there.”
As it turned out, Z and Vito weren’t intimidated by the senior mafia guys. They came back to the mall on the slower days when Vito could leave his shop unattended. The security personnel knew them by sight. Surveillance cameras could spot them as soon as they entered. They had to use more subtle means of persuasion. Instead of sitting down at coffee shops and food courts, for example, they had to pretend to be shopping, go into actual stores, and speak to individuals or small groups, as if engaging in casual conversation.
Of course, the upshot was that they had to buy a few things to make it look good. One day Vito bought some grooming aids for men. Another day he bought shoes, slacks, underwear. Once he went whole hog and bought a nice watch. Z got some good walking shorts and a nice pair of training shoes. All that walking on mall concourses was taking its toll on his feet, which had been sorely tested during his days of wearing snow shoes. He also got extra slacks and tops, along with some crazy designer T-shirts that reminded him of his lecturing days in torn T-shirts.
“You’re getting to be a regular shopper, aren’t you?” Vito said one day.
“If it’s the only way to reach the shoppers, what can I say? The gnosis is useless if it’s not heard or ignored. What good is your barber shop if there are no customers? Knowledge may be for the few, but wisdom has to be for the many.”
“You’re right. I gotta get the business back up on its feet.”
“Nothing wrong in shopping and business per se,” he said. “We all have to make a living, after all. It’s how we do it that counts.”
“Right. I’m a barber. It’s what I do.”
“And you’re a good barber, Vito. You look after the interests of your customers. Not only do you cut hair, but you listen to the ills of the world and absolve all sin.”
“Geez, if I knew that, I woulda charged extra.”
In time, however, Z had to modify his message. The shoppers just didn’t get it. Either he was speaking over their heads or at cross-purposes to who they were and their state of mind. They could’ve been devout Muslims or born-again Christians or observant Jews. They could’ve been Hindus or Baptists or fervent Catholics. Or entirely secular and indifferent to any belief and full-time consumers. It wasn’t like the apocalyptic times of old when the ears were open and the hearts were sick. When the people were anxious for redemption. And the few who received ecstatic messages and inspiration were looked up to as prophets. It was the time of deception and opinion. It was the time of egalité and prosperity — and the power of plastic. Who wanted to hear about subduing shopping when the god of the mall ruled?
The only way he could reach them, he found from trial and error, was to get into the same shopping mood as they were. And to get into that mood, he had not only to talk their language but actually be in their head-space as well, as Vito had advised him from the very beginning. He had to be a real shopper, even an über-shopper. He had to speak to them about brand names, go gaga over designer labels, feel the rush of retail therapy after making a good purchase, joke with the clerks at the various stores, soak up the mall odour, breathe the controlled air, and actually walk down the concourse not like a Cynic-dog but like a cardinal in the cathedral of retail.
Eventually he also made up with the mall mafia of seniors, began to talk to them about ways of unionizing the mall workers. Don Carlo, who had once been a mayor of a small town in Sicily, appreciated his ideas. They even modified the mall rules to include items that encouraged shoppers to be less addicted to shopping. Don Carlo asked him to make suggestions to change the décor of the concourses, make them more aesthetic and homier. Maybe even capture the old-world charm of the piazzas in Europe. He had the ear of the mall manager, he said.
Sometimes he and Vito went to the movie theatre complex on the west side of the megamall. They saw the same movies the shoppers were seeing, the family movies with computer-animated figures and the super-hero movies with the ear-splitting sound tracks and mind-numbing special effects. There was nothing, it seemed, the movies couldn’t do on the screen to create a fantasy world. They could make an ordinary Joe into a super-hero or demi-god, make as if the whole planet was destroyed by a meteor, offer up the latest fashions in clothes and cool, show the vast vistas of space, and recreate the stories of the Bible as if they were real-life occurrences.
Metaphor and myth were dead — and only the literal lived. It was as if the comics had come back to life. In one movie they had seen of Noah and the flood, it wasn’t just the constant rain that produced the deluge. The earth had opened up, as if by divine intervention, and geysers had sprouted and the waters had consumed all living things, all done in the ear-shattering music of audio-power. When they came out, they both had headaches from the loud sound track, feeling as if pulverized into insensate consumers.
“Is that what the kids are all seeing?” Vito asked him.
“It’s the medication of the masses,” he said, shaking his head.
It was difficult to get his bearings after watching these movies. He was far from his cabin in the bush, away from the silence of his own thoughts, away from the gods of the air and the earth, and ever farther away from the pneuma and the gnosis.
How could he fight against the fantastic spectacles of the movie screen? How could he bark louder than the techno-amplified sound tracks? How could he lead the people out of their enslavement to the flesh and the mall? They had been medicated beyond redemption.
The more time he spent in the mall, the less he felt different from the other shoppers. He was no better, after all. They could’ve been his former students. And in order to get across to the kids he had to be a kid. Vito had been right all along. What was the use of being a watchdog if no one understood your bark anymore?
The shoppers just went their merry way, oblivious of all his barking. And if they wanted to graze in the low valleys instead of the high mountains, who were you to think yourself superior to them?
Maybe he was the one who was self-delusional. Maybe he was the one who falsely thought he had been commissioned. Maybe he had heard a false call. What did he have to offer the shoppers, after all? He couldn’t lead them out of their slavery to shopping to a promised land flowing with milk and honey. He couldn’t convince them of the freedom of the pneuma and the gnosis when they were firmly convinced they were free to buy anything they wanted.
Who would want to go into the desert and risk starvation and death? The kingdoms of the world were already there in the mall, ready for the picking, he could see. And the price to pay for giving up the mall was too high.
As a good shopper, Z had become alerted to all the prices. He had heard the voice of the mall shoppers through the rules of the older gentlemen-guardians and in his sleep. There was only one god, the god of the mall, and it would defeat all the other gods. As shoppers, they were to honour its sales every day of the week. They would take care of the mall and the mall would take care of them. They would only buy what they could afford. Not everyone could shop at the high-end stores. Everyone had to find their appropriate level of shopping. If Dollarama worked for them, then let it be Dollarama. When they were ready for Dolce & Gabbana and Holt Renfrew, they’d know soon enough.
All Z could do now was bide his time in the mall. Be a shopper like all the rest.
And dress in ready-to-wear.
About the Author
F.G. Paci is the author of 13 novels and 3 collections of short stories. He is best known for Black Madonna, a novel that deals with feminist issues and the immigrant experience in Canada. His eighth novel in his BLACK BLOOD series is The Son (Oberon, 2011). The last two novels in the series remain to be published. His two previous collections of short stories were Playing to Win (Guernica, 2012) and Talk About God (Guernica, 2016). He lives in Toronto with his wife and has one grown-up son.
F.G. Paci, Dead Voices
