“I was going to make us something, but it’s too damn hot,” Mave said. “Let’s do a drive-through. What do you feel like? Burgers? Wraps? Fried chicken?”
“I’m okay.”
“My blood sugar is so low I’m a road hazard. This’ll just take a sec.”
“Um, is this a legal turn?”
“Oh, it’s Vancouver,” she said, thumping over a concrete dividing curb, the love bug’s undercarriage groaning like a dying foghorn. “They change the rules all the time. Who can follow them?”
“God. I hope you have a decent skid plate.”
“Jared, relax.” Mave cut off a banged-up older-model Toyota Corolla as she pulled into the drive-through lane. The Corolla honked.
He poked his head out the window to see if they’d left anything behind. The curb was crossed with layers of smears, probably from other impatient coffee hounds, but none of the smears and scrapes looked shiny and new. “You might want to check your universal joint. And your oil pan.”
“What a little worrywart you are.”
“Bugs aren’t built to four-by-four.”
“Oh, you should see the potholes we’ve survived.” Mave pulled out her wallet. “You have a chance to make your life what you want it to be. Open your mind to the possibilities!”
“Can we drop this subject?”
“I’ll drop the school talk if you drop the snarky remarks about my driving.”
“Fine,” Jared said.
Mave rolled down her window and studied the menu board as if it were a secret treasure map. Jared willed himself to unclench his jaw.
“Welcome to Tim Hortons,” a young woman’s voice droned over the intercom. “How can I help you?”
“I don’t think you understand your potential,” Mave said.
“I didn’t catch that, ma’am. Are you ordering poutine?”
“Potential!” Mave yelled into the intercom. “The possibility contained within you before full realization.”
“Good, ’cause we don’t make poutine here.”
“How did you decide what you wanted to do with your life, if you don’t mind me asking?”
The line of cars was growing behind them. A man yelled, “Fucking order already!”
Jared peered in the side mirror. The yelling man was behind them in the black SUV. He laid on his horn. Jared sighed. Trust his luck to finally make it to Vancouver and get shot because he was between some asshat and his caffeine fix.
“I hated retail,” the attendant was saying over the intercom. “This was close to my apartment and I don’t have to do the night shift. It’s kind of boring, but I like being home when my kids get home.”
“Order a fucking coffee like a normal person!” the SUV guy shouted.
“He’s going to shoot us if you don’t order,” Jared said.
“Some people,” Mave said.
“Amen,” the woman said. “I miss real winters. I’d move home if there were any jobs there.”
“Where’s home?”
“Just a sec, honey,” the woman said.
Honk. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Honk. Another voice chimed in: “Some of us have lives, you know.”
The intercom crackled. “Uh-huh. Okay, uh, my manager is going to give you a free coffee if you get out of line.”
“What a sweetie! Do you want anything, Jelly Bean?”
“No, nothing. I’m good.”
“Don’t worry. I’m paying.”
“Let’s just move.”
“Are you too shy to ask for what you want?”
“He sounds shy,” the woman said.
Honk. Honk. Honk.
“A grilled cheese panini,” Jared said. “Okay? Can we go?”
“Oh, that sounds good. I’ll have one of those too.”
“My boy loves it with ham.”
“That sounds better,” Mave said. “One regular and one with ham on multigrain.”
He checked his phone, more for something to look at, something to do.
“I worry too,” Mave said as they pulled up to the takeout window and a pale blond woman with black rings of eyeliner leaned over and smiled at them.
“Sorry if I got you in trouble,” Mave said to her.
“Not a problem. That guy behind you is a regular. His wife left him for his business partner and he’s cheesed at the world.”
“Hey, add his order to my bill, okay? Tell him I understand heartbreak.”
“We’ve all been there, honey.”
They laughed. The blond woman handed Mave a takeout bag and they drove away.
“If you could be anything, absolutely anything, what would you be?” Mave said.
Jared wanted to bang his head against the dashboard. God, she was like a dog with a bone. “I’ve always dreamed of being an ultrasound guy. It’s possibly the most awesome job in the world.”
“Really?”
“Yes, it’s like being Batman.”
“I don’t think you’re being sincere, Mr. Snarky.”
At least she was off the Jelly Bean thing.
“People come in and something’s wrong but they don’t know what and they want answers. I will help them get answers.”
“You want to help people.”
“Yes.”
“You’re not saying that to get me off your back?” she said.
“No.”
“Huh.”
Mave parallel-parked the love bug four feet from the curb. “Here we are!”
He sort of recognized the street from google-mapping the area. Her apartment was grey with white trim. A kid on the top-floor balcony spat through the bars. One of the ground-floor windows was covered with a Mohawk flag, a warrior in profile against a yellow sun on a red background. Someone had drawn a blunt and stuck it to the corner of the warrior’s lips. A memorial pole painted with a black-and-red beaver stood to the side of the wheelchair ramp. Jared tilted his head: Lu’ma, the memorial pole read.
“What does Lu’ma mean?”
“Lu’ma Native Housing,” Mave said, climbing out. She reached into the back seat and grabbed his backpack with the balloons tied to it.
“No, hey, I got that,” he said.
“Don’t be silly. You’re my guest. Take the groceries.”
She had six grocery bags. All of them seemed to have bowling balls in them. She held the door open for him and they made their way down a wide beige hallway. They took the elevator to the second floor. Mave hummed, out of tune, a melody that buzzed at the edge of his awareness. Jared shrugged. He stifled a yawn.
“Damn,” she said. “Did you remember the takeout?”
“Uh, sorry.”
“You go in and make yourself at home,” she said, pushing the apartment door open. She dropped his backpack inside. The balloons shivered. “I’ll be right back.”
The floor of the long hallway was a jumble of her shoes. The walls were painted with a mural of a forested mountain reflected in a flat-calm sea. On the left wall were mountains. At the bottom of one, giant-beaked bird-headed men stood in a clearing on a carpet of human body parts. The monstrous bird men studied a wooden longhouse emerging from a thunderous red-black foam of clouds. On the right wall, the ocean. Near the beach, a giant black bear with a seal’s tail snacked on a canoe of screaming warriors in full regalia.
Okay, Jared thought. That’s intense.
Jared carried the groceries into the kitchen and set them on the floor. Holy Costco addict, Batman, he thought. The counters were already filled with industrial-sized packages of food—vats of spaghetti sauce, kegs of ketchup, a box of oranges. The kitchen had a window cut into the wall that opened to a large living room where columns of books hugged the walls and clustered in the open spaces. One corner of the living room was stacked with thin cardboard boxes filled with unassembled bookcases. The window overlooked the street and a wall of apartments. The TV was tuned to a rerun of the first episode of the rebooted Doctor Who, when Rose was in the basement before the mannequins came alive. Hunc
hed in the recliner was a scrawny Native guy in a fuzzy green bathrobe who glanced at Jared and then turned back to watch the show.
Mave hadn’t mentioned a roommate. Or a boyfriend, though this man seemed a little too sloppy to be her type. Maybe a cousin, a fellow couchsurfer.
“Hi,” Jared said. “I’m Jared.”
The guy hunched into himself, squinting.
“Okay,” Jared said.
He had assumed he’d be on the couch, but he could, maybe, clear a spot on the floor. There was a little maze through the books. Some of the columns came up to his waist and some came up to his armpits, but most were around knee height. He bent over: Saltwater Women. Our Laws Bid Us Protect the Land: Pre-Contact Indigenous Logging Practices in British Columbia. Emergence: Native American Cannery Workers, Unions and Political Resistance. One pile of books seemed to be all about residential schools. The next one was all poetry. The one assembled bookcase in the living room had collapsed under the weight of what looked like a collection of encyclopedias, which had tumbled around it in a spray of pages.
“You’d think that, as a Capricorn, I’d be a little more anal,” Mave said, dropping the bag of takeout on the dining room table. “But I’m cusp-y. If I’d been born four hours later, I’d be an Aquarius.”
“You have a library,” Jared said.
“Sorry about the mess,” she said. “Edgar sold all our bookcases on Craigslist and I haven’t gotten around to setting up my new ones.”
So Bathrobe had a name. “Have you read all of these?”
“Most of them.” She pointed to the takeout bag. “Let’s have a picnic on the balcony.”
Mave and the bathrobe guy didn’t look at each other. So they had a silent-treatment kind of relationship, Jared thought as he followed her through the door that led to a large balcony lined with planters filled with dead plants. It overlooked the front of the building. Mave sat on a metal chair that had been haphazardly spray-painted primary yellow with bits of grey showing through. She pulled the food out of the takeout bag, checked the contents and leaned to hand one of the paninis to him.
“Thanks,” he said. He sat on the other chair, still in the original grey with cancerous rust patches. The metal was sun-warmed. Heat from the balcony radiated through his shoes.
“I travel a lot for work,” his aunt said, poking a pot on the table. “I think this was basil. I was on a pesto kick.”
“Mom kept bringing home spider plants to clean the air,” he said, “and they kept committing suicide.”
“It’s genetic, then.”
“Looks like.”
“I have to warn you,” she said, “your room’s weird. Edgar painted it. I meant to repaint it, but, you know. Life.”
“Does Edgar mind me taking over his room?”
“He owes me three months’ rent. And the damage deposit I’ll never get back. Edgar can kiss my ass.”
So not a boyfriend—a roommate. Awkward. Roommate fights were never fun when you were caught in the middle. A room in Abbotsford was looking like a good option. Hopefully, his loan would come in soon. He could always get a part-time job to make ends meet.
“I should have got an iced coffee,” she said. “Want something cold? I have Diet Coke or orange juice.”
“Whatever you’re having.”
“Back in a flash.”
Jared felt sweat drip down his back. He hunched his shoulders, rolled them back. The sun was still high, but the wind shifted, bringing a damp ocean breeze. The skinny trees lining the street shivered. Traffic lurched. Pedestrians ambled in the August heat like zombies. He unwrapped his grilled cheese and as he was taking his first bite, he noticed someone across the street standing completely still, staring at him. David. Jared had a moment of dislocation when the world paused like a DVD, and he was both here and not, in his body on the balcony and above it, looking down from a great distance.
“What’s the matter?” Mave was back with two glasses of orange juice. She followed his gaze.
Not David—the man had darker hair, and was wearing high-waisted jeans that David would never be caught dead in. The creepy dude ducked his head when he realized Jared was staring back at him and wandered towards Commercial Drive. Jared had lost track of time. It felt like hours since Mave had left, but obviously it had only been minutes.
“Nothing. Just zoning,” Jared said.
“I promised to bring my aunt grocery shopping and then we’re going out for lunch,” she said. “If you want to meet your great-aunt today, you’re welcome to join us, but don’t feel obliged.”
“If it’s okay with you, I’ll play it by ear.”
“Fair enough. Sorry for the weird factor in your bedroom. The sheets are clean, though.” She handed him a set of keys.
“Thanks, Mave.”
“You’re welcome to stay as long as you want. I mean that.”
“Do you mind if I take a shower?” Jared said.
“Scrub-a-dub-dub,” Mave said. She checked her watch. “I’m going to meet a friend for coffee. I’ll see you later, Jelly Bean.”
She kissed his cheek, which made him uncomfortable. A few minutes later, she emerged from the entrance below him, walked crisply to her car then turned and blew kisses. She got in the bug and squealed into the street. In her empty parking spot, Jared saw a suspicious puddle of fluid on the pavement. She probably had damaged something at the drive-through. Jared went inside, leaving the balcony door open. Bathrobe was still parked in the tan recliner in front of the TV.
“Hey,” Jared said.
Bathrobe ignored him.
“I’m only going to be here for a few days,” Jared said. “I can sleep on the couch if you want your room back.”
“Obviously, you’ve mistaken me for Mavis’s previous tenant. But I am not the insalubrious poet, Edgar Six.”
“So, what—are you Mave’s cousin? A friend? What’s your deal?”
“You obviously lack anything resembling brainpower.”
“Dude, can you stow the ’tude?”
“My ’tude?”
“If they were selling manners-in-a-can, you’d need to buy a truckload to get to normal.”
Bathrobe rolled his eyes. “Oh, and you’re a veritable diplomat. My humblest apologies, Ambassador Jelly Bean.”
“Whatevs,” Jared said.
He grabbed his backpack. He locked the bathroom door, hung his cap from a hook draped with necklaces and stripped out of his grubby clothes.
The water was gloriously hot. He let the shower blast his shoulders where his muscles had cramped. He sniffed through the soaps and chose the one that was the least floral. He scrubbed hard. He towelled off. Dug out a clean T-shirt, underwear and shorts.
He opened one door, onto Mave’s room, where a queen-sized bed was a calm spot of carefully tucked blue sheets in the middle of a clothing explosion and more books. He opened the other bedroom door. The window had a black garbage bag duct-taped over it. A large solar system mobile was attached to the light socket, and when he flipped the switch, the sun glowed orange and the planets creaked in wobbly circles, bouncing on their wires, which made the red bits of cloth tied to them flicker. A grey, billowing fog was painted on the walls and ceiling. Suspended in the fog were disembodied heads, lit from below, serene and staring men, women and children. Some of the faces were tiny and far away, but the ones closest to the bed loomed larger than life-size.
Someone had ripped up the carpet, leaving jagged bits of beige around the wall. On the floor was a painted city of skyscrapers that were curled like shells, like coral reefs, like sand dunes as seen from a helicopter looking down. The city painted on the floor was alive with chubby grey people, who, on closer inspection, turned out to be dolphins.
The desk was clear plastic, and Jared could see a stapler, pens and sheets of paper in its only drawer. Which was kind of cool, like having X-ray vision, he thought, except it made the desk a useless place to stash porn. The chair was a grey plastic hand. Jared sat and put his backpack on
the desk beside a cat-shaped clock with large cartoon eyes that swept the room with every tick. He swivelled. The twin bed had a steel frame that Jared hoped wasn’t creaky and a quilt patched from shades of grey cloth, edged with a black ribbon stamped with white skeletons disco-dancing à la John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, a movie Sophia had conned him into watching when he was a kid by promising all the characters turned into zombies at the end.
His phone pinged in his back pocket.
R u ok? Sarah texted.
He took out his charger and plugged his phone in. He was trying to decide how to respond when he noticed Bathrobe standing in the doorway.
“Your aunt gave Edgar the boot after he painted the hallways,” Bathrobe said. “She thinks he went off his meds. But he didn’t. He saw the dead and it drove him insane.”
“Huh,” Jared said.
“I must warn you,” Bathrobe said. “This room is haunted.”
“Yeah?”
“Not by me,” Bathrobe said. “Some of us have better things to do than lurk in the walls like some Amityville reject.”
“I’m taking a nap,” Jared said. He stood and walked over to the bed, and sat, bounced a couple of times to test the firmness of the mattress. In case Bathrobe didn’t get the hint, Jared lay down and closed his eyes. The quilt was soft and smelled like lavender. When Jared squinted at the door, Bathrobe was gone. The solar system creaked in rusty circles.
“Weirdo,” he muttered, and got up to flip the light switch off.
11
Humans evolved as prey and have the sleep patterns of nervous mammals, a measly seven to eight hours of unconsciousness that cycles from light to deep sleep, half-alert and ready to run. Top predators can sleep fifteen to sixteen hours a day, secure in the knowledge that nothing is hunting them. They are the scary thing in the night.
Dolphins never sleep and yet they’re always asleep. The two hemispheres of their brains have evolved so that when one side is asleep, the other side is awake. The hemispheres switch back and forth, letting one rest while the other is active.
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