The problem was so ubiquitous that Jaymie couldn’t believe it wasn’t talked about more often, wasn’t discussed around tables by groups of intellectuals with graph paper and PowerPoint presentations, that there wasn’t a dollar value resting on its solution, and that competitors didn’t stay up at candle-lit desks working over it like a difficult math proof.

The issue is this: if you're lying face-to-face with your new lady-friend, as close together as possible, very little time tends to elapse before you become unendurably distracted by the discomfort of the arm tucked underneath. Certainly, everyone in the world who has ever made out with someone else has encountered and puzzled over this conundrum.

“Do you have to leave tomorrow?” Mira pouted.

"I'll think of you every single day I'm away!" promised Jaymie, who, if all went according to plan, would be away for exactly two and a half days.

You could rest your arm under their neck, which was a cuddly temporary solution, but it had at least two problems: 1) Only one person could do this, so you were still stuck with one Awkward Arm to contend with, and 2) your arm would inevitably fall asleep. It was hard to predict how long this was going to take, or what the determining factors were. Did some people have heavier necks than others? Was it determined by curvature? Whether or not you were in contact with an Adam’s apple? Do women even have Adam’s apples?

“Let’s make every moment count!” she said, pressing closer.

He wrapped his outer, non-problematic arm around her waist. “I like the way you think,” he mumbled into her mouth.

You could never truly settle in with someone. No position was sustainable, and almost all of them left one person pretending they didn’t feel weird that their wrist was, say, pinned down by their hip; and then they’d make some excuse to free it—for instance, feeling suddenly compelled to brush your floppy hair back behind your ear, but then they were faced with the terrible truth that there was no room for it up there, and some loose forearm flailing ensued until it was forced back to its previous location.

The other person then had to pretend they hadn’t noticed the embarrassment of the first person, because both knew there was no hope of finding true comfort until they’d grown exhausted of kissing and were finally lying on their backs talking about where they grew up and whether or not they liked their parents.

“Are you comfortable?” he asked.

“Perfectly,” she sighed. They lay still. “…Are you?”

“My arm is literally completely asleep.”

Jaymie was so unfamiliar with prolonged awkward feelings that when he did experience them, the effects were all-consuming. He was used to other people's awkwardness; after all, he fronted a band. He was good at diffusing the nerves of those who came to praise him after a show. Usually all that was required was to know how to accept a compliment with charm and warmth.

“I’ll just…” He shifted.

“You’re on my hair.”

“Oops… Is this better?”

“Yes,” she said. “But it could be even better.” She took his non-pinioned hand moved it over her stomach, letting go at the waistband of her yoga pants and leaving the next steps up to him.

Jaymie knew that he and Mira were not destined to be together long. The distance between them was too great—she owned a house in Charleswood, a neighbourhood so far on the other side of the city that it may as well have been in a different dimension.

He moved carefully overtop of her and kissed her again, freeing their arms from captivity and keeping his eyes open so that, as he closed the distance between them, her thickly-lashed lids morphed into one cyclops eye, a goofy all-seeing gem at the center of her pineal gland that he imagined saw through his false confidence to the depths of his bottom-arm apprehension, and forgave him.

***

One day before the tour, Aaron tracked Jo down at the Millennium Library, where she shelved books for slightly less than minimum wage. He was feeling the need to confess his misgivings.

The library, which had six floors—each with its own labyrinthine floor plan that didn’t correlate to any of the other five—had always made Aaron uneasy. It took hours of wandering to find what it was he was looking for, and when he returned the next time, he always found that everything was rearranged and he had to relearn the entire landscape. This, coupled with the fact that you never knew who or what you were going to come across in the miles of stacks, made visits to the city’s downtown public library a source of disorientation and distress.

Aaron preferred the world of online fiction, a place of mad free-for-all where anything goes, but which could be enjoyed from the safety of one’s own home.

After an uneventful hour of casual searching, stopping to scan the Music Biography section or fall victim to a real-life-clickbait title in Applied Psychology, he found Jo shelving prehistoric-looking tomes in the Quiet Zone study area. She was perched atop a tall ladder, her hair in a long ponytail. A couple of butterfly tattoos were attempting to escape the collar of her blouse and creep up her neck to peruse the shelves.

As he crossed to where her ladder was propped, he nearly tripped over a short humanoid creature dressed entirely in grey except for the lower half of his, her, or their face, which was just visible under a hood.

This being was a feature of the Quiet Zone, where it crept around on silent sock feet and paused at the nook of anyone reading or studying there. It extended a small decibel reader, and if the scratching of their pen, or the tiny, tinny beat from their earbuds, or the purr of their congested breathing registered at above twenty dB, they would wake up a few minutes later propped in an alcove in the Hushed-Whisper Zone, with all of their belongings in more or less the same position and no idea what had happened.

Yet another reason why Aaron never felt at home in libraries.

“Jo?” He stopped at the foot of her ladder. Jo checked the Dewey Decimal number on the grimoire she was holding and took a moment to slide the dusty book into place—a moment longer than necessary, in Aaron’s opinion, and he wondered if maybe she hadn’t heard him. Then she looked lazily down and descended the rungs.

“Fancy running into you here,” he said as she stepped onto the grey carpet. “What a neat coincidence, in a giant maze like this. Just came to pick up a book of… ancient satanic rituals.” He squinted at the indecipherable faded gothic font on the spines of the closest books.

“Wow, you guys just show up everywhere, don’t you?” she said.

“I show up in very few places,” said Aaron. “But I’m used to people saying confusing things like that, based on their assumption of my telepathic knowledge of Jaymie’s comings and goings.” Come to think of it, he did know Jaymie had visited her apartment recently, though he couldn’t remember who’d told him.

“Sorry, Aaron. That was rude of me. I’m not used to having conversations in the library,” she said. “This is my first one. How are you?”

“Good! I love the library,” he lied. “It’s so nice and… quiet. Hey, do those guys ever make you nervous? The little noise ninjas? Just a little?” He pointed at the diminutive quiet-enforcer standing motionless a few metres away, his or her or their decibel reader hanging limply at his or her or their side, staring at him.

Jo shrugged. “They don’t bother the employees much.”

"Ok, so, tour! Wow, is that tomorrow already?" Aaron knew his attempt at enthusiasm more closely resembled hysteria.

“Hey, you’ve never toured before!” Jo grinned. The noise-patrol gnome gestured angrily at her. “It’s going to be great. They know how to party, out west.”

“Yeah, I mean no, I haven’t. Jaymie has—he’s played with a few other bands. Rex and I have only been in this one.”

“It’s the most fun in the world,” she assured him. Jaymie had promised the same thing, but Jaymie had labeled a number of things as The Most Fun in The World, and somehow the things Jaymie found most fun didn’t always leave Aaron feeling safe and emotionally enriched.

“I’m not sure if Jaymie knows what he’s doing. He’s never booked one himself.”

“It’ll be fine—we’re starting off small. You play some good shows and some bad shows until you have enough connections that they become mostly good shows.” Aaron must have looked unconvinced, because she continued, “There’s nothing to worry about. We’ll deal with problems as they arise. Jaymie seems well equipped to do that, for all his… unconventional ways of doing things.”

Aaron nodded, suddenly curious about Jo. “How far have you toured?” he asked.

“West, out to B.C., east to Montreal, and a few shows in the States. With my old punk band. We went illegally, though—didn’t bother with the visas. I wouldn’t do that now. You have to think about the future, you know?”

“I know,” said Aaron, and he did know. The future, and all its ominous possibilities, was all he thought about.

The grey-swaddled creature, who had approached noiselessly to stand between them without either of them noticing, now jerked an arm into the air, waving the decibel reader in front of Jo’s face. Aaron jumped and clutched a hand to his chest, then walked to the elevator and back a few times to calm down. Jo rolled her eyes and muttered a few words to the gangly imp. She cast an apologetic smile at Aaron and resumed her shelving until he’d relaxed.

Aaron directed his internal dialogue away from a tirade about the pointlessness of leaving the house, toward a congratulations on expanding his boundaries, as per the instructions of his cognitive behavioural therapist, and crept back to Jo’s book cart.

“Sorry about that,” she said. “It is the Quiet Zone, I suppose.”

“Right, no problem.” Aaron took a deep breath. “The other thing, um, I don’t know if you heard already… There was another death. At a Shadowventures show. That, uh, instrumental surf-rock cover band? It was their lead guitarist. Just so you know.”

It was clear from Jo’s expression that she had not heard. She set the book she was holding heavily back down on the cart. “Well, shit,” she said. “That guy really knew how to tremolo pick.”

Aaron nodded and stared at the floor.

“Well, it’s a good time to get out of town, I guess. Play a couple of safer shows.” She squared her shoulders and picked her book up. “Too bad, though. Are you ok?”

“Yeah, but…” Aaron fidgeted. “You don’t think it’d be a good time to… take a break?” He finally managed to look her in the eye. “Jaymie’s thrilled that you’re in the band, and I feel like if anyone could convince him to lay low for a couple months…” Jo shifted uncomfortably, and he knew he was fighting a losing battle. “I have a sister—sibling, I mean—who’s basically still a kid, and I feel like if anything were to happen…” He looked at her helplessly. “He won’t listen to me, because the last time we had a tour planned, in the spring, I sort of… It’s a long story.”

Jo’s expression was half pity, half something else that could have been annoyance or scorn or desperation or something else entirely that had very little to do with him. (His cognitive behavioural therapist was encouraging him not to take everything personally).

Finally, she said, “If we stop playing, then whoever—or whatever—is doing this will win.” She picked up a book. “Nothing’s going to happen to any of us. We’ll be careful. And people don’t tend to mess with me. In case you haven’t noticed, I can be a little intimidating.”

He had noticed.

“It’ll be fine,” she continued. “Don’t worry about anything. Especially not the tour!” A look of genuine excitement crossed over her face, and Aaron couldn’t help but be reminded of all the manic and meaningless pep talks he’d received from Jaymie over the years, any time Jaymie was in need of an accomplice.

He nodded and gave a quick, forced smile. It occurred to him that Jo needed the band possibly as much or more than Jaymie did. Aaron wondered if she had friends or siblings. Did she have anyone else to jam with? What did she like to do on weekend nights when they weren’t practicing?

He understood that she had no desire to take a break.

“I’ll let you get back to work!” He jerked his head at the agitated decibel enforcer. “Before this guy murders me! Haaaaa…”

"See you tomorrow, Aaron." Jo lifted a hand in farewell, then moved back to the ladder, hefting a new armload of books.

“Bright and early…” He paused at the stairs. “Pack for an extra day,” he called, receiving another glare from the Silence Officer, who was actually a very young delinquent allowed to serve community service hours, in lieu of juvenile detention, by encouraging silence in the study zones. “Something stupid and terrible will come up—it always does with Jaymie.”

“Sir,” she replied, “You’re being too loud. If you must speak above a murmur, you may do so in the Hushed-Whisper Zone. It’s one floor down from the Quiet Zone. Thank you. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

***

The next day, the Brzezinskis loaded their gear out at the crack of noon, picked Jo up at 12:34, and began the six-hour drive west for the weekend, unaware that they would be delayed from seeing their home city again for much longer than an extra day.