After the door closed I turned the deadbolt as per my instructions before I realized how silly that was. Who was I afraid of?

I walked over and sat in the platform rocker and began to rock. I had loved that platform rocker since the days when it was in my great grandmother's parlour. As a child I had spent many hours in that rocker, watching a motion lamp that gave the illusion of water falling endlessly over the lip of Niagara Falls.

Such a ridiculously simple contraption. And yet it had fascinated me. I would turn it on and wait for the heat of the incandescent bulb to create a draft of warm air that flowed up through the vents at the top of the lamp. After less than a minute the inner screen began to move, almost imperceptibly at first, but accelerating steadily until it reached a constant speed of rotation. I wondered how many times the inventor must have adjusted those vents to get the speed of rotation just right, so the water fell over the falls in a realistic way.

That lamp was long gone, lost in some consolidation of household effects after my great grandmother, then my grandmother, then my mother passed. And yet I could visualize that lamp in my mind just as clearly as if I was eleven years old and had just closed my eyes after watching it for an hour.

I rubbed my forehead with my hand, anger welling up from my gut. How is it that I can remember every detail about this stupid lamp from 65 years ago but I can't remember my own name half of the time? In what universe is that fair?

But of course fairness has nothing to do with it. It is a numbers game and my number came up.

So now I alternate between days like today where I feel totally at home in a world that I know and other days, most other days, where I am as lost as a ship that has drifted into a fog bank.

Seventeen days. Too long imprisoned in the fog. It is time.

I stood up and walked back through the kitchen and opened the door to the garage. It was so packed full of cast-off furniture, various pieces of seldom used sports equipment and sundry other items that Justine could not park her car in it. Instead, she had to leave it outside in the bitter cold, only able to start it in the morning if she remembered to plug in the block heater.

This general state of chaos in the garage had worked in my favour. My cross country skis, poles and backpack remained untouched, abandoned in a corner. I had to step around bicycles and an old generator in order to reach them.

I opened the backpack to confirm that the alcohol that I had managed to smuggle into the garage in a moment of clarity had not been discovered. A bottle of scotch and a bottle of Drambuie. The other articles I needed were also intact; a large wine skin, ski boots, mitts, and the red and gold woolen tuque that my grandmother had knit for me while I was attending University. How was it that I still had that tuque after all these years?

Laying against the back of the pack was a sheet of paper carefully taped into a transparent plastic report cover, a long string attached to the top and bottom punch holes. I had no idea when I had printed that sign but recalled that it had been a tense few minutes working with Justine's computer, fretting about the possibility that she might catch me in the act.