It was for various reasons that I started to avoid the campus. Partly it was the allurement of dissipation - a dissipation for which I would always feel disproportionately guilty when, striving to recapture my workaday schedule, I would return at night to the library to work, or wander belatedly past the subject rooms whose lectures I was supposed to have attended. Partly, too, it was the real lack of like-minded spirits with whom I could share - well - perhaps nothing to which I could specifically subscribe a name. But something was missing in my life, and the quality of this lack annoyed me with its refusal to become explicit; it was like those pictorial puzzles in which, here or there, a few objects have been amended or excised, and you have to locate all ten revisions. Perhaps ultimately it was simply the desire to embrace the very world which did not define me, so that I could see the one that did from the standpoint of a stranger.

At any rate, I let the rent lapse on my room, moving in with a crowd of musicians who had found a disused warehouse near the harbour. Once it had been a studio of sorts; the abandoned practice rooms were strewn with the remains of microphone stands, power cables and rolls of fibre glass. From dumps and backyards nearby it had been newly furnished with battered mattresses, a cooker and an old PA.

"You're going down," I said to myself expectantly, as if by doing so I could take the initiative for the things which were changing in my life. I wanted to be able to see myself clearly among the masonry dust, the broken windows and urine-soaked floors, and to accept this as an irrevocable part of my destiny. But nothing really constrained me to stay until the day I met Uyen.

The meeting was a non-event; I met her in the sense that we spoke for the first time to one another. But I had met her a dozen times before; she was perpetually flitting about in this or that corner of my life. It seemed as if I might even have met her months before in bars, in the library, begging for money on the street. Like a wind, carrying leaves from place to place, she belonged everywhere and nowhere, constantly rubbing shoulders with different people, passing from affluence to desuetude with an impetuousness which unnerved me, a helpless lack of purpose which was almost pathetic. Part-time girlfriend of many, several times, in my loneliness, it occurred to me to put a similar proposition to her myself. But, though we spoke, neither of us ever arrived wholly at whatever that indefinable essence is that constitutes a conversation; something was always sweeping me or her away; and for days I would forget her completely, busking with my guitar on Simcoe between the turn of lights, panhandling with the beggars on Bloor East, or smoking pine needles, bored out of my mind, on the benches in Queen's Park.

Instead, something else happened. Sensing my interest in her, she took me to heart as confidante; but she told me nothing about her life. On the contrary, she seemed to have within her an almost inexhaustible quarry of absurd and grotesque fables which could never have occurred, although "It's bloody true, as well!" she would usually affirm by way of conclusion, invariably with the same flicker of dirty merriment in her eyes, as though the world were somehow a better place for the fact it was so easy to disbelieve.

The stories were like parables, but it was impossible to relate them coherently to either of us; they were constantly becoming lost as they strove to reach something else which stood outside of them, where their meaning must have subsisted. If anything united them, it was the recurring theme of the disinherited or disposessed; but just as her subject matter had required no introduction, so it left nothing to deduce. Impoverished men and women were perpetually involving themselves in a world free alike of justice or injustice, and the moral of their existence seemed to be little more than the fact they opened their eyes each morning. She spoke, and then she would stop speaking; it was as if the words would never make a story, but she recanted with a passion, striving to uncover the deception they had wrought upon her.

Then one day – a day which seemed no different from any other day – the stories ended, with the same lack of explanation with which they had begun. They ended because the little money I had left was gone. Uyen had been spending it sheepishly, though I was glad that I could entice her with such small things as a basket of shopping or a pack of cigarettes. Returning from the shop with the brown bag of groceries, "We'll share it," she would say resolutely, whether I was hungry or not, as though she could never accept my charity outright.

Now I had lost all claim upon my little comrade of the gutters; a heftier gust of wind seemed to catch her up, carrying away the smutted face and downy lips, the faded denims and the ragged sweater beneath which I had never seen. Each of us seemed to have outgrown the purpose of the other, although I remained uncertain what it was exactly that we had shared. Perhaps those anecdotes were the only personal thing that she could have given me?

I returned to the campus, resuming a life I already disparaged for the very fact it had failed to discriminate my absence from it. Now and then I would see Uyen uptown or downtown, always hurrying to some indeterminate appointment. It was only once that I found her alone, sitting on one of Ossington's street-corners looking malnourished. She seemed not to recognise me until I called her name, then stood up to embrace me silently; she had nothing to say.

For many years I forgot all about her, as if the same wind that seemed to carry her about the city had also blown her into one of the corners of my mind; and it was the event that caused me to remember her that at last made sense of the strange life we had shared. A rich Osaka girl, I heard, had had her credit-card stolen in the coat-check of a nightclub; but the card was returned, unused, the very same night. Oh, Uyen and that girl have nothing in common; it was the shadow of the man who must have stolen that card, incapable of profiting from a kanji signature he would never be able to fake, baffled by an identity which could have no point of contact with his own.