Last Thursday night Barnaby got drunk and woke up in Montreal. Calmly he got out of bed, washed his face, put on his corduroy suit, and tiptoed out of what turned out to be a bed-and-breakfast in the neighborhood Montrealers call “the gay village.” He found a diner nearby in which to have a croissant and cafe au lait, and after the waitress had asked for his order in what sounded like French, and he had replied likewise, he looked out the window and considered his options.

He saw a city with many pretty churches and parks, with excellent restaurants and a few good museums and universities, and the best baklava in North America; but a city, also, that was not entirely thriving, that had thousands of people struggling and begging on the street, a city that, its pockets of rich comfort notwithstanding, did not entirely keep out the cold. But his memories of youthful trips to Montreal were rosy and sweet, and he had nowhere else to be—he decided to call up a friend and make a weekend of it.

“After all,” he said to the waitress as she set down his croissant, “quand la vie te donne de citrons, il faut que tu fasses de citron pressé.”

“That’s all right, sir,” the waitress replied. “I speak English.”

After calling his friend and asking to sleep on his floor that night, the first thing Barnaby did was stroll over to the Gallimard bookstore on Boulevard St.-Laurent. There he spent a happy hour browsing through elegantly designed French books that were, for the most part, not at all expensive. He chose a Voltaire, a Camus, and a Perec, and then, in the box of Editions Allia next to the cash register, between a book by Werner Heisenberg and a paperback collection of dirty American comics, he found a short book of Antonio Vieira’s “Sermon of the Good Thief,” Le Sermon du Bon Larron. According to the book’s cover, Vieira was a 17th century Jesuit priest, alternately in and out with royals and bigshots, who fought the power of the Holy Inquisition and argued for the rights of “new Christians” (Marranos) and natives in the Americas, and was one of the great Portuguese prose stylists. Barnaby, who does not read, had never heard of him.

The next thing Barnaby did, all these books in hand, was stroll a few more blocks up St.-Laurent and join the enormous line of people waiting to get into Schwartz’s Hebrew Delicatessen, most of them, like Barnaby, tourists intending to eat “smoked meat” sandwiches. (Smoked meat is like Canadian pastrami.) Barnaby leaned against the building and opened the Vieira book, discovering a brilliant and thrilling writer.

Christ, as we know from Peanuts Christmas specials, was crucified between two thieves; and he, the king of kings, took the thieves with him to Paradise, but in this world it is usually the other way around—it is thieves that lead kings to hell.

In order to attack corruption among colonial governors, Vieira begins by demonstrating, with scriptural references, that thefts cannot be forgiven if the thieves have the power to repay them, but do not. Then he argues that kings are responsible for the thievery of men they appoint—thus do the thieves carry their kings to hell. For even God himself was crucified—Vieira says—to repay the sin of Adam in Eden, because it was he who had put him there. God foresaw that Adam would sin, but placed him in Eden as he was, before he sinned, and likewise chose Judas as a disciple judging him only as he was at that time. So similarly, if kings appoint men they know to be good when they are appointed, they might be forgiven their subsequent crimes; but they do not. Do kings wish to know whether the men they appoint are honest? Vieira asks. Let them refer to the words of Christ:

“Qui non intrat per ostium,” Barnaby sang out, startling several old women from Idaho, waiting for their sandwiches, “fur est et latro!” He who does not enter through the front door is a brigand and a thief. In other words, Vieira explains, government officials appointed through favoritism, nepotism, cronyism, or anything else other than the strictest and most impartial weighing of merit are ipso facto thieves, because they have stolen their positions. No one can claim to be surprised when they go on to commit further crimes.

Vieira ends his sermon by calling the bluff of institutional hypocrisy so brilliantly and forcefully that Barnaby almost wept. Surely no one can disagree, he says, with his suggestion that corrupt governors be dismissed and made to repay what they have stolen. Their victims, of course, will agree; and the king, too, who will thereby save his own soul and theirs from eternal hellfire, surely he must agree; and even the thieves themselves, who might be expected to resist—surely they value their eternal souls more than transient goods that one way or the other they will lose when they die? Surely they prefer being punished briefly on earth to being punished eternally in hell? Or do our Christian leaders not, in fact, believe in the Final Judgment they claim to believe in?

“The problem,” Barnaby said to the waiter, once he had been seated in long and narrow Schwartz’s, “is that our Christian leaders, unlike those of seventeenth century Portugal, are Protestants who believe in justification by faith alone, and who think that they can do whatever they want so long as they believe in Jesus. Perhaps if Bush were a Portuguese Roman Catholic, he would fire Alberto Gonzales—and Condi Rice—and Dick Cheney—and Karl Rove—and himself. But no, I shouldn’t say that—a Bush of any other denomination would still find a way to be an asshole. One smoked-meat sandwich, medium, a half sour pickle, and a can of cherry soda.”

“You got it,” replied the waiter, and from there the day went downhill. First Barnaby lost his appetite watching the men at the next table, a stag party who had come to Montreal for its famous strip clubs. They each ate an enormous smoked meat sandwich, two whole handfuls of pastrami with extra fat, and then the fattest of them ordered a grilled steak bigger than a plate. To go with this all, a tiny dish of coleslaw, diet soda, and hot peppers, the last of which the fattest one rejected: “I don’t need no hot peppers, B,” he said to the waiter.

“Excuse me,” Barnaby said, leaning over and tapping him on the meaty biceps. “Forgive me for being nosy, but how many weeks has it been since you had a bowel movement?”

As Barnaby strolled up seedy St.-Laurent Boulevard, holding a wad of napkins against his bloody nose, toward Avenue Mont-Royal, and then down Mont-Royal toward the park, he considered the question further. Certainly the “born again” types like Bush had pledged themselves to an illiterate and contrary understanding of their own theology; surely mainline Protestantism—ephemeral antinomian movements excluded—does not mean to preach that you can do whatever you want so long as you believe in Jesus. But it does seem particularly liable to that misreading, and Barnaby asked himself whether subtle ideas that, when misunderstood, have catastrophic consequences, are not better off left unpromulgated. It is nothing, necessarily, to do with Christianity—in Japan, for example, Shinran Shonin came up with his own salvation-entirely-by-grace doctrine as an Amidist Buddhist. Indeed, perhaps it is not necessarily to do with anything—perhaps religious doctrines, cultural values, and all the rest of it are only so much window dressing, endlessly flexible, that can always be adapted one way or another to camouflage man’s basest instincts. Perhaps the meat-watching, meat-eating fraternity men at Schwartz’s were not “subscribing” to a peculiarly American ideal of machismo—perhaps they were just assholes.

Later that afternoon, after a wheezing hike up and down Mont Royal, Barnaby made his way to a gallery deep within the Art Department of Concordia University, where his friend Patrick was asleep in a chair, looking like a young Dylan Thomas in bluejeans. He was showing a piece called “Skyline.” He had built a computer program that was slowly but steadily erasing all the MP3 files in one particular music-sharing network; as the files were erased, their lengths altered another program which projected a series of pulsing white rectangles on the floor and played an eery, wave-like soundtrack. Patrick rubbed his eyes and stood up, and together they stared down into the terrifying, beautiful void he had constructed, a wolf-like face of nihilistic perfection.

Patrick taught Barnaby everything he knows about boosting crudité, and both on principle and for practical reasons refuses to spend money on food; so Barnaby, grateful for his hospitality (and under the impression that every one of his American dollars would buy him two Canadian) offered to take him out to dinner. They had a long, raucous, wine-besozzled dinner, arguing about art and bragging about sexual conquests, or vice versa, and stumbled into Patrick’s basement on St.-Viateur well after three in the morning.

The following day, as Barnaby stared at his credit card receipts and reckoned out the cost of a train ticket home, and he and his friend both sipped beef boullion and chewed aspirin tablets, Barnaby casually asked Patrick the exchange rate. Pat replied that it was almost to par. Barnaby clutched his head.

“You mean those forty-dollar bottles of wine actually cost me forty dollars?” he screamed.

“I guess so,” Patrick said.

“And the panhandling young men,” Barnaby said, “and the half-dead, staggering businesses, and the large immigrant ghettoes, and the oblivious cream of rich people traipsing along like butterflies, and the panhandling old men, and the thriving prostitution, and the quasi-fascist cultural controls, and the increasing rapaciousness on top and desperation on the bottom, and the seediness everywhere that no longer seems so picturesque—that’s not all just someone else’s problem anymore?”

Patrick turned and padded into the kitchen to make coffee.

“Welcome to Earth, America,” he said.

[Schwartz’s Hebrew Delicatessen can be found at schwartzsdeli.com. The Gallimard bookstore in Montreal can be found at gallimardmontreal.com. Patrick Valiquet can be found at fragm.net. Barnaby Sandwich can be found lying on his couch with a cold washcloth on his forehead.]