Earlier he’d told me that because he’d tried contacting the Brazilian with the letter, the judge had sent him to the hospital, and he now had to report to this officer once a week.
As he told me these things I remember wondering if the two mothers sitting next to us had heard any of the conversation, and what they would have thought if they had. It felt strange to be sitting so close to them, to be living in the same city as them, and yet being so separated.
I also remember that when we left, Cam grabbed a Georgia Straight and flipped to the back of it and pointed to an advertisement, saying, “This one looks interesting.”
For a long time afterwards, I did not know what to make of that summer. From movies and from the books I read I had come to expect that events could be fit together into some sort of a narrative, that no matter how tangled or twisted the plots or varied the events might be, some theme and direction could be discerned. But here there appeared to be nothing, just random images, remembered sensations, bits of dialogue—it was how it is with an Al Adamson movie, stock footage and outtakes spliced together with only the briefest nod to coherence. (That at least was what I wanted to believe.) But years later, when I began to speak to the people around me about that summer (none of whom I’d known back then) telling them in hurried antidotes and little snapshots about what had happened, finding that one shot would lead to another shot, that one scene would fade into another scene, that even where the shots did not flow that that too was part of the story, I came to see the reason for my reluctance to view “the movie” as a whole, my wilful inability to grasp its significance—for it was only by the seeing it as a whole that my role came into view.
People always say to me when I tell them about Cam or Damien or Alex, “Wow, man, you really cared.” But that was not what I saw when I rewound and rewatched those six months in the late ’90s (and consider the scenes that did not make this final cut: the scene where I told Cam and Damien to smash Tiff’s Porsche, the scene in which I drove Cam to an apartment in East Van, the scene where Alex told me she was going to have an abortion and I remained silent.) What I saw was not someone that cared, what I saw was someone that frightens me.
Acknowledgements
I want to express gratitude to the staff and the students of the UBC Creative Writing Department who helped me out along the way: Susan Juby, Annabel Lyon, Lisa Moore, Annie Zhu, Trevor Corkum, Irina Kovalyova, Jessica Block, Jill Sexsmith, Jessica Michalosky, and Kristin Seeman.
I am particularly indebted to Lee Henderson, without whose initial enthusiasm for my work I may never have continued; Roger Seamon, who has been a indefatigable reader of my work over the years; John Metcalf for his enthusiasm for this novel; Dan Wells for taking a chance on it; and Zsuzsi Gartner, whose belief in me as a writer kept me going, and from whose editing I have learned much.
Finally I would like to thank Miho and our three children, Mina, Curtis, and Rachel for their patience, my grandma for her tireless proofreading and suggestions, my mum for various ‘literary’ birthday and Christmas gifts (the money for my first Creative Writing class was one of them), and my grandfather for his financial and emotional support.
About the Author
Shawn Curtis Stibbards is a school teacher who lives in North Vancouver with his wife and three children. The Video Watcher is his first novel.
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