I put the phone to my ear, hoping it would be Hooker, but heard a small voice say, “It’s me. Gracie?” the last syllable of her name rising like a question.
“I’m on a different ward, now,” she said. “I’m allowed visits. They even let me out of my room to make this phone call.”
Rainy didn’t want to come to the hospital again, not twice in one row. Frenchy said she would take her to do some Christmas shoplifting, and I dropped them at the mall. A true gift, in Frenchy’s eyes, was something you personally stole. You know it come from the heart, person take time to steal it for you.
At the hospital I was informed that even though Grace had been transferred to a lower security unit, I would still have to leave everything I’d brought with me in a locker. I couldn’t take items such as money, food, a comb, even a book or magazine, to the detox ward.
I locked up my car key, then followed the overhead signs; the double doors were electronically sealed and when I pushed the buzzer a male nurse peered at me through a wire-thread grid imprisoned in glass. The door opened inward, and the nurse, his face worn, featureless as his uniform, said he would escort me as far as Room C12.
The hall was dark, poorly lit. The only light I could see came from the ruddy glow of an “Exit” sign at the opposite end of the building. When I asked the nurse why the lights were off, he said, in the most matter-of-fact way, that light bulbs got stolen as fast as they could be replaced, their filament wire being just the right size for reaming the #25 needles junkies liked best. “Patients call this ward Drugless, what a joke.” When we passed the nurse’s station I watched an orderly slip a condom over the mouthpiece of a telephone before putting it to his lips.
The nurse unlocked Gracie’s room that had a green sticker on the door — a child in the fetal position, inside an eye shedding a tear. The nurse told me visiting hours were over at three, and locked the door behind me. Even though the room was brighter than the hallway — a barred window took up most of the outside wall — the darkness just got darker. I stood, feeling as if I were a prisoner again myself.
A TV screen hung suspended from the ceiling in the middle of the room where you couldn’t reach it to adjust the volume or change the channel, just like the ones we had in our cells at the Facility, only this was tuned to the Weather network. TV, on the Row, had been used as a kind of electric Thorazine: an inmate who practised a slumping vegetable life in front of her TV was a tranquil inmate, cheap to accommodate. “Ladies who don’t enjoy watching TV are the ones who get into the most trouble,” our care and treatment counsellor had said, when I went to ask her permission to have my television permanently disconnected.
There were four beds in Grace’s room, three of them occupied. A girl with half a face looked up at me and moaned, “you pay me first then you take my fuckin’ picture.” A woman with a birthmark shaped like an inflated kidney bean on her neck lay in the bed next to Grace by the one section of the window that opened; a breeze rippled the shadows of the bars that fell across her body, making her appear fragmented. Grace turned her head when she heard me enter. Her entire being looked sad, even her fingernails and her skin. She had that look people get when they are about to tell you something that will change your life.
Grace, and both the other women, had green stickers on their charts, the same as I’d seen on the door. She made room for me on the bed, told me to sit, and patted her belly as if she were encouraging the life inside her not to give up. I put my hand on top of hers, toyed with the plastic bracelet listing her allergies — penicillin and honey dew melon — on her wrist.
“You’re the only one who came,” Grace said, after we’d sat in silence. “Hooker said he’d come back, but he didn’t. When you look like you’re going to die the whole world starts caring about what‘s going to happen to you. And then, when they save you, they get mad if you say you didn’t want to be saved.”
“Hooker cares, Gracie.”
“Not even.”
“I’ve talked to him. He cares, he just doesn’t know how to show it.”
Grace said he wouldn’t have left her a prisoner on a locked ward if really cared. She said she didn’t belong here. They fed her jello salad. The TV never changed, unless you could afford to pay for it. They had installed cubes of ultraviolet light in the bathroom so you couldn’t find a vein to shoot up in.
She looked away as she spoke. “They don’t trust us. They hate us. They make jokes behind our backs. They think we deserve to get AIDS. They hope we’ll die.”
I said it wasn’t true, everyone wanted her to feel better. Grace said she didn’t want to feel better. She didn’t want to live. She’d rather die a bleeding scabby death in a dumpster alleyway, than live this way. Her eyes came to rest at the bars on her window.
“Hooker cares,” I insisted. “You’re all he’s got.”
“Hooker only cares about himself,” Grace said. “Strike a match on his soul, he wouldn’t even flinch.”
I sat, not knowing what to say, wanting to ask more about Hooker, wondering how much, if anything, Gracie knew. I told her about Vernal’s call. Grace perked up at the mention of Vernal’s name, when I said he had checked into a dry-out centre on the north shore.
Grace said she knew how he felt. She’d been in and out of detox most of her life. “The last time I checked in I thought this is crazy, I don’t need this.
“The guy I was with, he wanted to stay high. When they wouldn’t give him his keys he left on foot, towing his suitcase behind him down the road. I looked around the place and I started getting this wrong idea that I didn’t need anybody’s help, I could get clean again all by myself. I had will power. I called home. ‘Naha,’ I said, ‘come and get me. No one here has any teeth.’
“‘Have you looked in a mirror lately?’ my naha says. I looked in the mirror. I didn’t have any teeth, either!”
Grace gazed somewhere beyond me. “One guy in that place, he lit himself on fire. I’m the one who found him — I tried to put him out. Normal people, when they burn, they burn with a blue flame. When a heroin addict burns . . . well . . . the flames are green.”
I’d been locked in the room with her for less than five minutes when another nurse came in, ostensibly to check Grace’s blood pressure and take her temperature, but in fact, Grace told me after she left, to see if I had brought drugs with me that Grace hadn’t had time to hide. The nurse looked in the drawer in the table beside Grace’s bed, flipped through a stack of old magazines — including the Newsmakers with my face on the cover — and a Bible, checked under her tongue, and between her legs, then narrowed her eyes at me. Who else but another drug user, her eyes said, would be visiting an addict on Drugless?
“Any problem with your medication?” the nurse asked Grace, still looking at me as if I were a bad influence.
“I already told you,” said Grace, “there’s a problem. I keep telling everyone, I don’t want to take it.”
The nurse ignored her, as if she knew what was best, and handed Grace a small white paper cup with a hexagonal orange pill in the bottom, and a round white one. She waited until Grace went through the motions of putting them in her mouth and swallowing.
As soon as the nurse was gone, Grace spat the pills out and gave them to the woman with the birthmark on her neck. “She’ll swallow anything,” Grace said, “even if she has to chew it first.”
She lowered her voice. “You bring anything, a pick-me up? Coke? Percocets? They don’t let you have painkillers in here. It might make you feel less worse.”
I got off the bed and went and stood by the window, looking down into the courtyard where two men in sky-blue pyjamas were planting plastic flowers in the dirt, blossoms first.
“Hooker killed Al, didn’t he,” Gracie said, suddenly, but as if it had been on her mind all along. “It doesn’t matter now,” she said, before I could reply, “He didn’t pay his way. He didn’t even pay for his toilet paper. I’m glad he’s dead now. I wouldn’t have been able to say that a month
ago.”
Grace asked me for the pencil that was in the drawer beside her bed, and to pass her the Bible. She tore a page out of the New Testament and wrote on it, then folded it into a tiny square and told me, using hand signals, to put it somewhere safe and read it later. Then she asked if I could bring her the bedpan because it hurt too much to get out of bed. She pulled the sheet off and pushed away the pillows she’d placed on her belly. Gracie looked like Baby-Think-It-Over, her body emptied out.
“Oh my God, Grace,” I whispered. “What happened?”
“I lost him,” she said. She raised her eyes to the sticker on her chart. “That’s what you get when you lose a baby here.” She made a face. “It means you’re on suicide watch.”
I stood there holding the bedpan, not knowing what to do. At first I thought she meant her baby had died at birth, but then Grace said they came for him in the middle of the night, gave her an injection, and when she woke up she saw her baby’s soul squeeze out between the bars on the window, and fly up into the air.
“Heroin makes you the loneliest person on earth,” she said.
She thought she knew everything there was to know about loneliness until they took away the one thing that might have mattered to her, the small piece of heaven that had popped out of her like a shiny lifesaver.
Grace asked me to find Hooker. He had promised her, if they took her baby away, he would get him back.
The light was beginning to fail as I drove into the downtown eastside. Every plywood wall that had been erected around a condemned building; every brick wall overlooking a vacant lot; each lamppost, hydro pole and garbage can was a frenzy of Missing posters — the older ones choked out as the more recent fought for their own fifteen minutes of breathing space — pictures of missing women who had, long ago, become lost in the helpless privacies of their beings. As I waited at a stoplight I saw a poster of a “Missing” boy: he looked as if someone had told him “smile if you know what’s good for you,” when all he wanted to do was cry. “Lick Me Diddle Me,” had been scribbled across his face.
I passed a pawnshop, with a baby’s car seat and high chair in the window. There was nowhere I could go any more, nowhere that wasn’t emptied of meaning, of love.
I hadn’t read the note Grace had scrawled on the scrap of paper, addressed to Hooker at the Outer Planet Hotel, until I’d been alone: “Help me, pleas.” I parked in a Commercial Loading Zone a block away from the hotel and when I got out I realized the socially disadvantaged types who might have been thinking of mugging me were instead eyeing me with a mixture of curiosity and fear. I placed the “On Appointment” sign in the window and walked, purposefully, as if going about some deadly business, past the panhandler whose tongue lolled from his mouth in a wad of flesh, past the woman sleeping half-naked in the back of a pickup full of empty beer cans, past a row of dark, unloved apartment blocks. I kept my face closed and, as I walked, people moved away from me, even crossed to the other side of the street, as if I had one of those diseases you can catch from standing too close to another person. There was no sign of the impending Christmas debacle in this part of town, no flashy displays of lights, no halls decked with anything but misery, though there were “negativity scenes”, the bona fide kind, in every doorway. In many ways I felt more at home here, more vibrantly alive (my mother would have called it having a taste for the gutter) than I did at the Walled Off or even at the farm. I worried that, having lived in prison for so many years, I would never be satisfied, now, to live a life rich with possibility and choice.
I read the fading words, “Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planet: Hourly and Weekly Rates”, in a ground floor window and went inside. Someone had screwed a red light bulb into a socket in the ceiling above the counter, a concession to the season, I guessed, or a clue — for those who couldn’t read the sign — as to what kind of negotiations went on behind closed doors. Not five diamonds, but nice. I looked around, but couldn’t see anybody, and was about to ring the bell when I smelled smoke coming from the other side of the counter. I looked down and saw a man in a wheelchair, a cigarette between his lips, sucking smoke in through his teeth.
“I’d like to speak to the manager,” I said, before realizing the nametag he wore said Manager. He reached up and stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray full of what looked like pubic hair, and the lobby filled with another, more disturbing odour.
“Some towns adopt a highway. Mine adopted a minefield,” he said, assessing me with the expression a marksman might have, concentrating on his target in a firing range. “That’s supposed to be a joke,” he said. “My sick idea of a joke, anyway.” He toyed with the fringe of the blanket covering his lap. From the way the blanket hung, I could tell he had lost both legs. I looked away, behind him to where I could see rows of room keys hanging on hooks.
“What can I do you for?”
I said I was looking for a friend, Hooker Moon.
“Everybody’s looking for somebody,” he said, smiling enough to show off his yellow stumps of teeth. He looked like the sort of man who smiled as a tactic, not because he felt there was anything worth smiling about. I opened Vernal’s wallet, found a fifty-dollar bill, and smoothed it out on the counter.
The manager reached for the bill, inspecting it to see if it was a fake, then set it down on the ashtray. “Native guy? Long hair? Good-looking? Yeah, he was here. Stayed one night and then left. Never saw him again.” He looked at his watch as if he expected it to back him up. “Police came looking for him, wanted to ask him a few questions. I think it was yesterday. He done something I should know about?”
I said I had a message for Hooker from his sister.
“Yeah, well, he seemed like a regular guy to me,” the manager said.
I took a card with the hotel’s phone number on it from a chipped dish on the counter, and left. When I got back to the hearse I didn’t feel like going home right away, so I drove out to the university and parked on a cliff-top with a view of the ocean, thinking of Kliminawhit, how Hooker had been right, that life had been so much simpler there.
Rainy and her twins lay sprawled in front of the television watching The Simpsons. “Aren’t we forgetting the true meaning of Christmas?” Bart said, as I locked the front door. “You know, the birth of Santa Claus?”
Rainy’s eyes were half-closed in her head that seemed to have come unattached from her shoulders. When she heard me come in she said she was going upstairs to say her prayers and I said I’d go with her, but when I went to switch on the light on the staircase, nothing happened. I looked up, saw the bulb had been removed, and remembered I’d found Rainy getting ready to change it, earlier in the day. I thought of the hospital and the nurse saying how many light bulbs got stolen. Frenchy was online chatting with the founding member of her ALA group.
What he do, anyway, get hisself killed on down? Rainy snapped at her, as if she resented Frenchy having anyone else in her life.
Frenchy shrugged. Most likely gatt some white boy. Nigga blow away another nigga, they look at it like he doing the world a favour.
Rainy knelt down by the window and began reciting her version of The Lord’s Prayer.
. . . .And cut me some slack, Blood
So’s I be doin’ it to dem dat diss me
Don’t be pushing me into no jive
And keep dem muhfos away
Cause you always be da man, G,
Straight up, Ahhhhh, man, Ahhhh, man . . .
Frenchy waited until she said her final Ahhhhh, man before saying she should listen to Step Eleven instead of investing any more hope in prayers: “Understood (through our prayers never being answered) that there is no God, that we are born alone and that we die alone and in between being born and dying there is nothing but isolation.”
You smokin like an old pistola, Rainy said. Holy Spit-it be everywhere, big time, best believe.
I went to bed and fell asleep right away, but then woke an hour later from a nightmare. I stumbled from my mother’s bed, found
my way upstairs and cracked open the door to the room where Rainy and Frenchy slept. The twins lay at rest in their coffin and the HE squatted by the window, not sleeping, but with his eyes closed against the need to meet mine. Rainy lay spread out across the bed, grinding her teeth the way Toop did, Frenchy beside her with tampons protruding from her ears.
I heard weeping, and when I went back into the hallway I realized the sound was coming from inside myself. I buried my face in my hands, and the crying only came harder. Nothing I could think of would stop it, and after a while I didn’t even try.
I-5 came upstairs when he heard me. He was high: I could tell from the way his eyes slitted around the hall to see what had upset me. I told him, through my tears, that I must have had a nightmare that I’d been smoking freebase cocaine again, because I had smelled it so strongly it had wrenched me from my sleep. “You live long enough you become like the rest of us. Unrehabilitable,” I-5 said.
He put his hands up over his head in what was getting to be a familiar gesture of surrender, then lowered his arms and gave me a look only another addict would recognize. “Sometimes life just seems to be going on for such a long time. Polish off some of your hurt?”
That’s all it took. I got to my feet and followed him down the stairs.
In the kitchen I-5 poured me a tinto — sweet black coffee — in a tiny cup, and then produced a bottle of licorice-flavoured aguardiente, from a cabinet. I hadn’t tasted either since Tranquilandia where each day began with el blanco y negro, two big rails of cocaine and a tiny cup of tinto. I would cut out my white lines and drink my coffee, and let the rest of my life, the world, float away. I wanted only to feel the hum in my veins, the freeze creeping into my gums, the nosola burn, the bitter tang of cocaine mucus down the back of my throat.
I sipped the thick black coffee. I-5 took a flap from his wallet, and laid out four white lines as long and straight as the Interstate highway, the one he’d been nicknamed after, that ran the length of Florida. I knew at once I was in trouble by the way my mouth watered and my palms began to sweat.
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