by Shilo Jones
* * *
This is the persona of a twenty-six-year-old Canadian woman with six months of post-secondary education who sleeps in the backseat of her Prelude. The rubber seal around her sunroof is cracked and separating. Water’s been dripping on her legs all night. She’s piled clothes over her head in the hope that someone peering through the window won’t see her. It’s still early, pre-dawn. The light is diffuse, cloud-softened, and cold. Her car is wedged between two dumpsters behind a Chinese restaurant. Seagulls peck and tear at overstuffed garbage bags, scratch and skitter across the car roof, leave the windshield smeared in rotten eggshells, coffee grounds, regurgitated cigarette butts.
It’s not a good sleeping spot. She’s parked illegally on private property. Soon the restaurant employees will arrive, if they haven’t already. She doesn’t want to put dishwashers and prep cooks in the position of having to bang on the car and ask her to leave, or call the cops. A good spot is both private and public, in a neighbourhood not too posh but not completely down and out. For this reason she avoids parking anywhere west of Cambie and north of Venables. Younger guys living in camper vans with their dogs might feel okay parked outside the warehouses around Powell, but she doesn’t. A good spot is somewhere the parking meter guys don’t check often and there are no NIMBY homeowners out for morning walks who will hassle or rat on her.
Last night she slept with her head rammed into the armrest and her knees pushed against the door and she can feel the knot in her shoulder that will move through her neck to become a brutal headache by midafternoon. Her sleeping bag is bunched and twisted around her waist. Everything is damp, sticky, frigid. The overwhelming sensation is of discomfort, followed by an anxiety she’s too proud to call fear. The young Canadian woman is wearing the same clothes she wore yesterday, plus an extra pair of wool socks, a fleece jacket, and a toque. But the damp gets in.
Something thunks on the roof, startling her. Only a gull. She grimaces against the gross taste in her mouth, tries to remember what woke her up. Was it the awful seagulls? Or did she hear someone working a sharp piece of metal into the locked door? She waits and listens, breathing silently, trying to hear beyond the noise of feeding seagulls. Is someone standing outside her car? Sometimes, often, every single night, she lies awake thinking about what she’d do if someone tried to smash into her Honda and harm her. She imagines scenarios that end with her successfully driving away her attacker with the minimal amount of harm to either party. She wonders: What are suitable weapons of self-defence in this situation? A kitchen knife? How big? Paring-knife size? Or bigger? She knows nothing about knives in particular or violence in general. She’s frustrated at herself for not knowing what weapon she should have, for seeming to know so little about anything. She reminds herself she never expected to be in this situation, that she needs to think more positively about herself, and the fact that she uses the phrase think positively about myself without irony, without the smirky humour she was known for at Langara, makes her very worried about what she’s losing or has already lost.
What she wants is to be alone in her bed—a real bed—and watch shitty TV all morning. She wants the luxury of time, of not being forced to get up to turn on the car heater, pee, brush her teeth. She wants to walk naked and safe from her bedroom to her bathroom. She realizes she has to pee very badly. She wants to blow-dry her hair. She wants her makeup in a single drawer instead of a travel bag with a busted zipper. She wants her notebooks and files out of the damp.
Completely awake now, and freezing. She blows on her cupped hands. No one knows she sleeps in her car. That’s how she thinks of it: I sleep in my car. It’s like camping. She doesn’t live on the street. Only real homeless people live on the street. Even now the social stratification is clearly defined. Other, much less fortunate people live on the street. They go to shelters. They use food banks. She’s just sleeping in her car until things turn around. Things will turn around. True, she didn’t expect to be sleeping in her car through the winter. It was one thing in summer, when it was warm and mostly dry and she could relax at the beach until late evening, reading and people-watching. Winter is different.
She decides to get up, tosses the tangled mess of blankets and clothes off her head, peers outside. The parking lot’s empty. The damp is in everything. The day hasn’t begun and she’s already exhausted. She feels another cold coming on. She’s been sick almost constantly this winter. A gull hops past the window and the motion conjures the image of a man peering in. But there’s no one. She’s irritated with herself for forgetting to fill her water bottle. Even a small sip would be better than nothing. The nasty taste in her mouth won’t leave until she’s brushed her teeth, which won’t happen until she drives to a community rec centre. She knows the locations and hours of every rec centre in the city. Sometimes she sees people she knows, regulars, and they’re largely silent with one another, no small talk in the change room, because morning is a private time, before the day, before there should be other people at all.
The thought of driving reminds the woman about her ruined brakes. How much is a brake job? And the thought of not having any money reminds her she feels disgusting: disgusting unbrushed teeth, disgusting clammy sweaty skin, disgusting unwashed hair. How can she see anyone like this? How can she go to work? This feeling will remain even after she showers. It will be in her voice, in how she walks, in her smile. The feeling will remain until she learns to forgive herself or cultivate the hatred that masquerades as strength. She wonders if people can sense or intuit her living situation? Do they know? Her brakes might cost as much as five hundred dollars. Maybe more. She doesn’t have a mechanic she trusts, is afraid of getting ripped off.
She resolves not to think about money for the time being. It’s too early. But the thought is always with her. Money. It’s not a thing anymore, on the outside; it’s another fear, hardwired, internal. There is no respite. Her breath rises inside the Honda while more gulls, attracted by the buffet of rotting food scraps in the bins outside, arrive to feed. The birds tear and thrash against one another. She wants to be generous, understand they’re animals living instinctively, but right now she can see only ugliness in their grey-black bodies and flicking beaks.
She’s woken to the sound of insane screaming very close by. She’s woken to the sound of a woman being thrown against her Honda and stayed silent, motionless, dying of shame but not moving to help, choosing cowardly self-preservation over her humanity. She’s confronted the fact that the idea and reality of herself are two different things and vary depending on circumstance. She’s woken to the sound of a cop’s flashlight banging on her windshield. She’s seen a cop in uniform and felt only fear.
At Langara College she sat in elegant lecture halls with raised seating arranged in a semicircle around a polished-oak podium. The lecture halls had excellent acoustics. The woman was attentive, hard-working, earned excellent grades. She’s been honked at while peeing beside her car. She’s been screamed at by a woman in an apartment while peeing against a cedar hedge. At Langara she heard lectures and had heated discussions on topics such as truth to power, authenticity, credibility, advocacy, objective truth, harm limitation, neutrality or the impossibility thereof. She learned words that revealed intellectually invigorating ideas and the ideas revealed a system of value she didn’t know she believed in until she was at school: faith in the tenacity and fuck-you stubbornness of truth. Some of her classmates agonized over its existence. She was too pragmatic or dull or clear-headed or literal-minded to involve herself in that conversation. Truth exists.
She tells herself this now, as she shivers with cold, and the statement is so cherished it has yet to become caustic. She tucks her hands in her armpits. Mornings are the only time she has to think. In the evening she’ll be too tired. Now—and particularly on mornings like this—she feels the vitality of the conversations she had in college, their impact on and proximity to her lived reality, waning. They’re becoming an abstraction, a luxury. Soon she’ll disappea
r from the conversation altogether.
She uses a baby wipe to clean her face. Another to scrub her hands. The Honda stinks of fast-food wrappers, dirty laundry, coconut hand sanitizer. Some of her former classmates are doing all right in their careers and she wonders why she isn’t, what is it about her specifically, what fault of personality or attitude or genetics is holding her back, and what does she need to do to change? Her legs are cramping. She can’t feel her right shoulder. She doesn’t believe in luck, bad or good, or in fate, in being born unlucky, in having a bad go, in being beaten before she began, but she’s beginning to understand the allure of such beliefs, their despairing comfort. She’s not yet angry, although sometimes she wishes she were. She remains stubborn in the belief that her life will turn around.
The dream of radical self-transformation is always with her, as is the desire to run. Who can I be somewhere else? Her full bladder is nearly unbearable. She estimates how long it’ll take to wriggle out of her sodden cocoon, crawl into the front seat, start the car, warm it up, drive to the YMCA, dig her towel and bathroom handbag out of the mess, hurry inside the YMCA? At least thirty-five minutes. She decides she’s going to pee outside, soon, behind the restaurant. She notes how little that bothers her this morning. She’ll pee behind the dumpsters with the seagulls and whoever the fuck else eyeing her. She doesn’t care. She knows it’s a mistake to conflate career and material success with self-worth but look at her, she thinks: Look at me. It’s impossible not to conflate them.
She wonders—
* * *
My sister’s suv rolls up the driveway. Afraid I might startle her, I stand and wave so she recognizes me while she’s still safely inside her vehicle. Meeta honks a greeting. The sound feels abrasive but I smile anyway, hope I don’t look so tired she gets worried.
Mark Ward
Sunday morning recon mission, three a.m., nice and early. Wake up, eat a boiled egg, take the elevator down to the parking garage beneath the Coal Harbour condo Clint hooked me up with yesterday after work, climb in the Ford, drive to Jericho Beach, park outside a house overlooking the Pacific, get comfy, smoke, study the Williams house, real keen. Looks like the offspring of a WWII bunker and a Fabergé egg, like a prison for rich people. A palace, one of many owned by Mr. Craig Williams. A palace here, a palace there, sprinkled around the globe. Why not? The man’s worked hard, deserves his money.
Sitting alone in the Ford, breath visible, rain beating down, feeling purposeful, reconning Williams’s money-can’t-buy-taste mansion, fixing his location in my mind, picturing him sleeping safe and sound, warm and tucked in, thinking about the homeless in the city, sleeping rough and cold, men, women, children, and that gets me thinking about the kids in Mr. Williams’s outerwear factory, flames rising up, factory walls superheating, DEATHFIRE, cinders sticking to flesh, lungs inflating tiny chests, hair igniting, a writhing horror piled against the locked doors, GODFIRE, toxic smoke, we made their women scream, how long did it take to die like that, fifteen minutes, an hour? And then it hits me, like it sometimes does, raw emotion, unfettered, so powerful it smacks my head against the seat, makes every muscle in my body tense, makes me shake, spit, snarl, a savagery of raging heart and righteousness.
And after that li’l episode? Mellow, easy. Emptied out.
Roll down the window, let the rain in, think about how brutal we are to ourselves, to one another, to life on earth. How vicious the culture is to what’s best in us. Was it always this way? And how there’s only a single story now, a total lack of viable alternative visions. Not that long ago there was still talk of alternatives—most of them puerile or idiotic or straight-up absurd, sure, shunned and lunatic rants, but still necessary, as difference is necessary to any fully functioning ecosystem—and how the conversation of alternatives has largely vanished except among an impotent coterie.
These questions, like rain on the roof, beating incessantly, thrumming through my head while I study a mansion with darkened windows and dream of an old-fashioned bloodletting, conscious of not making the best rational sense, or maybe of being too rational, aware of the flaws in my thinking, or at least some of them. Market dynamics. Negative externality. Aware that all killers, to one extent or another, rationalize their actions. Put differently: If the world were a better place, would the thought of kicking in Mr. Williams’s door…feel so commanding?
…and wondering, at what point, precisely, I went fully batshit insane?
Was it back in April of 2005 when I found Mr. Alfred Combs, kiddie-porn-king extraordinaire, reclining on his Corbusier? When I beat the man with a tire iron until my brother stepped in to stop me from killing him?
Was that when I went insane?
Or was it when I fled the crime scene and went to work as per usual? Did I go insane the day after the near-murder, when I waited for the guilt, grief, regret, and—unlike poor Raskolnikov—it never arrived, and in fact the opposite, I found myself smiling, not overjoyed but content, feeling like I’d done something nice for a stranger, a kind gesture, like holding the door open for an elderly lady? Was I insane for feeling I had made a definitive, concrete, and specific contribution to making the world a better place by almost murdering Mr. Alfred Combs? Was I insane not so much for the act, because murder is common, but for my response to it, which was basically: I need to go back and finish the job, proper?
Everything unknown, everything uncertain.
Maybe that’s as it should be.
At five a.m. the lights in Craig Williams’s waterfront home turn on, interrupting me, probably a good thing. At five fifteen the target emerges. The entryway light reveals Williams’s face clearly, a bold-looking man, strong nose and chin, a take-charge kind of guy wearing minimalist running shoes designed to strengthen the ankles, a stylish cobalt-blue track suit and a light blue running jacket with the hood up to shed rain. Our biathlete out for a morning training run. Staying fit, eating well, courting longevity.
Mr. Williams pauses at the edge of his property, taps his watch, no doubt synching to his online fitness tracker, then begins jogging west toward the university endowment lands. I watch him go, and satisfied with the morning’s work, fire up the Ford.
Drive to Pacific Centre mall, hunker down and try to sleep until the Apple Store opens, slink inside, buy a laptop from some sneering, golf-shirt-wearing techie, think about Doyle’s shotgun, laying into the joint, chk-boom chk-boom, scattering bystanders and those creepo-cult Apple salespeople, let’s see the tech wizards troubleshoot a buckshot cone, I disown you, usurper, pretender, no one opened a laptop and started speaking in tongues, no one ever flayed their flesh for a fucking cellphone, I disavow you, liar, naked emperor, walking out of the store sweating, feeling like a bug in the program, feeling outdated and obsolete, stunned by fluorescent light, self-conscious, stupid, bloodshot eyes and picked scabs, secretly hoping there’s an updated version of me out there, beta copy, ready to be downloaded, made compatible.
Carl “Blitzo” Reed
Private jet from Whistler to Calgary. Window seat. In the rain shadow east of the Coast Mountains, rocketing over rolling blue-green pine forests bisected by crisp, clear-cut geometry. In gentle terrain like this loggers use a machine called a feller buncher. Like a go-fast boat, there’s nothing quite as imaginative as naming an object after what it does. I press my face against the Plexiglas, try and discern a pattern hidden in the clear-cuts, pipe and power lines, these needy scrawls like contemporary Nazca lines, wonder and awe and flawed understanding, only instead of ancient astro-astronomy this is astro-investment. Astro-industry.
Perhaps the feeling is the same. Everything refers to something else, but it’s no longer possible to grasp the whole. Fragments will have to do. The risk is in focusing on the wrong fragment, a diversionary red herring. The enemy knows we have finite resources: energy, time, even money. They’ve become very sophisticated in their disinformation strategies. Psychological manipulation. The tactic now is to reveal everything, betray all secrets, overwhelm th
e processor, a flash grenade aimed at the collective mind. If everything’s true, nothing is.
“Michael? Why am I dressed like a matador?”
“You don’t remember? After the brewery meeting? You challenged Holdout to a—”
“Nah, I’d never. But I am so loving these sparkly pink sequins.”
The patterns are there for those willing to look. This I accept as a matter of faith. “Like in these drawings,” I say, holding up the sketchbook appropriated from the brewery kid in the burlap sack. “Tell me I’m off my rocker?”
Michael sets his tablet down, picks up the sketchbook, studies it. The man is an umbilical cord connecting me to earth. It’s a love-hate thing.
Holdout’s excited to be on the plane. Curlicue tail acquiver, snuffling, hopping on seats, trying to see out. I tell him he’s way too cute, sucking up. The pig answers by choking down a mouthful of aisle carpet. The brewery kids weren’t wrong about the subversive power of happiness. Their timing’s off, is all. Mistaking reification for actualization. Mistaking a multitude of niche products for meaningful choice—
“Yup. You’re way off your rocker. Nothing here but shitty drawings.”
“Try flipping it upside down?”
Michael takes a look, says no, just upside-down shitty drawings, his tone not unkind, tears a page from the sketchbook and feeds it to Holdout. I watch the pig’s lips saw back and forth across the page and think about the images being rearranged in his gut. Blurred by stomach acid. Organic alchemy.
“Why’d you tell the poseurs about Bute?”
“I didn’t,” he says. “I told you.”