by Shilo Jones
answr yer phone dont u want 2 float down amazon with me see
distinct unspoiled cultures see how it all endz 2 begin? See varanasi
dead people floating? What do u dream? Plz answr!!
not happy not cool least u cn do is text me sy yer ok??!!
yer mom cntacted cops *not me* dad is *not* a rat fink snitch cop
cntacter u can trust me plz call
ok cops r mega looking for u. best call me or mom!!
sory 4 my long absence power trip nurse OVERSEER took phone
while eating soup lights out soon PLZ cntct me!!!! :(:(before nine or
they take phone again :(:(
ok iget yr pissed you hav evry right 2 b but PLZ say u r ok??
totlly selfish. totlly not cool pssv aggressv BS…I LUV U tho.
nurse OVERSEER early taking phone total fascist will b back tmorro
at 9 AM PLZ TEXT ME OVRNGHT!! WILL GO 2 RHAB
SWEETY!! WILL GO 2 HELL 4 U!!! WILL TRY REALLY HRD
THS TIME!!!
Jasminder Bansal
So pissed off at Sim I don’t even bother going into my apartment. Driving across the Knight Street Bridge, punching it, stereo cranked so I can’t hear my brakes screeching even when I’m not on them, terrified I’ve put the people I care about in danger.
Late-night fog restless along the Fraser, spilling over the bank, reaching inland through strips of black-barked cottonwood jackhammered between pavement and flood dikes, drifting through shipping yards and recycling stations and gravel pits with piles of sand and rusted-out sorters, teasing through industrial mechanic’s shops and wholesale distributors and I’m driving east on the River Road, cutting across the yellow. Quick downshift and where could I go to begin again? And more importantly, would the memory of my brother fade?
My Honda rattling and whining, hitting corners too fast to brake and the river only twenty metres left, how long for the water to filter through vents and implode windows? Hearing nothing but bubbles and odd metallic pings as the engine rapidly cools, the current flipping my car until I can’t tell which way is up. I speed past an RV lot, Adventure and Adrenaline and Discovery, seasonal pad rentals, satellite dishes and frozen entrees, barrel cacti, and are those headlights up ahead through the fog? Oncoming traffic?
The cottonwoods open up and I see the river flowing swift, a doubling of dark into dark, a path winding through a forest, and there, in the middle of the river, blurred by fog, is a centuries-old schooner run aground and foundering, heeling hard to starboard, mainmast shattered, sails shredded. Headlights approaching fast around the corner and the ship decayed, rotten, ghostly. My car tracking through gravel on the left shoulder and the headlights getting brighter. The steering wheel pulling hard toward the river. I’m on the wrong side of the road and the thought hits that I hold their lives in my hands and Sim’s waiting for my word. The steering wheel shaking so violently it tears my skin. The smell of tidal mud in my nose. The ruined schooner listing in fog and darkness. No beginning again, no undoing. People, strangers in the car ahead, driving home, unknowing but trusting. I hold Clint Ward’s life in my hands or he holds mine or it’s both. The oncoming headlights feel inches away. I crank the wheel. A car horn recedes. We almost never do it; we’re better than we believe. I have to believe that.
* * *
The image is paused in a state of dissolution, grainy, nearly indecipherable, halfway to nothing, a rough copy of an even rougher original, a Sony Portapak cassette transcribed to digital and made valuable by the years accumulated since its creation. The scene is outside, in an East Vancouver alley. Spray-painted dumpsters against a brick foundation. A man and a woman, both dressed in flowing black robes, strap an odd construction to a third man’s back. The man is naked to the waist. The object is an accumulation of cubes, small and large stacked and stuck together to form a single mass. I can’t tell from the video, but my mother told me she made the sculpture from a white bedsheet wrapped around a chicken-wire armature and layered with plaster. Party streamers and what look like pom-poms hang off the construction, swaying as the man moves. The object doesn’t appear heavy, but it’s large, maybe five feet long and around the same width, sprouting from the man’s back, bending him forward, supplicant. The robed assistants, moving methodically, hold lighters to something glued to the cubic construction. The viewpoint widens, reveals a crowd of a few dozen gathered in the alley.
A bright flash, a shower of sparks. The performer flinches as glowing white embers cascade around him. The assistants step aside. A woman says something in a language I don’t understand and the performer begins dancing, slowly at first, sparks streaming from the cubic sculpture and skittering across the pavement, following his path, tracing a transient pattern in the air. Light shimmers through grey-black haze. No music, no cheering, only hissing sparklers and the man’s feet brushing concrete, and those quiet sounds create an even more palpable, almost material silence. The performer’s eyes are closed and his lips are moving in what could be prayer and there’s something joyful in his expression, and now the hot sparks falling from the plaster cubes run over his bare shoulders, shower down, burn skin, and watching the video I smell the man’s scorched flesh, see him grit his teeth, the dance now beautiful and hurt-filled.
The performer quickens his steps, bends at the waist, leaps from side to side, skin slick with sweat. His face relaxes. I’m sitting upright on the edge of my bed, watching the first artwork my mother created in this country, not trying to understand what the dance means, what context it belongs to, not thinking or questioning but only being, lost in physicality, the beauty and incomprehensibility of flesh in motion, alive, and the intimation of a violent end that pervades the dancer’s every step. The burning sparklers fade. The dancer collapses to his knees, cries out. The attendants remove the sculpture from the wounded performer’s back, and in the smoke drifting through the alley I see the unmistakable image of my brother.
My mother named the piece sedition.
I play the video while skimming through Peele’s documents, adding a few notes, dreaming of a takedown. My mother comes in, asks what all the mess is. Before I can answer she sees me playing her video, asks me to turn it off. I do, and she sits on the edge of the bed beside me, says she heard voices outside, saw Sim and me arguing, asks where I went so late.
Looking at the blank screen: “For a drive.”
“You still taking those river drives? What about your brakes?”
“Looks like they held up. It was pretty out.”
My mom lifts a bank statement. “What’s all this?”
“My work.” My life.
What I read into my mother’s silence is that she knows I’ve decided to keep things from her and she won’t try to drag them out of me. Sometimes I wish she would. “It’s not only my work at Marigold? I mean it is, but it’s…”
She puts her hand on my knee. “What?”
I know who murdered Amar. When did the truth become a distance between me and those I love? There’s no way to explain to my mother why I’m at Marigold without telling her the whole story. I stuff the bank statement in a file folder. Lying makes more sense than truth ever will. “They’re just financial documents for my clients. I think I’m going to do okay there.”
Mark Ward
Daylight filters through floor-to-ceiling windows, a toneless morning light, soothing, welcoming, saying you’re okay, Mark, everything’s cool, it’s gonna be all right…
And that’s how it is while I’m standing naked smoking and making scrambled eggs until I look down and written in the cast-iron pan in the snotty half-cooked egg mess are the words END OF DAYS and what the fuck who wrote that in the runny half-cooked eggs did I write that and for a second I’m horrified but then it strikes me as fucking hilarious, silly as hell, END OF DAYS what kind of stupid doomer shit used to justify all sorts of hateful atrocities END OF DAYS all flaccid and silly made of watery scrambled eggs not big and powerful but what happens too bad for me is
my leg gives out and I smash into the cast-iron pan and drag it off the stove and the snotty egg mess splatters all over my thighs and belly END OF DAYS and I’m still laughing as I grab the dishtowel and wipe the sticky egg mess off, fuck sakes, yuck.
About to hop in the shower when my brother yells from out in the hall, bangs on the door, rapid and demanding, the day going from weird to worse. Pick up my smoke, consider not answering. My post-post-apocalyptic mood is shit, convinces me to chase two Oxys with a double vodka and sour milk. Clint and me are going to go our separate ways, make real the internal rift that happened years ago.
Take my time looking through the peephole, stalling to irritate him. My brother looks monstrous, so tweaked out and warped by the fisheye lens I barely recognize him. Clint sees my shadow in the peephole, screams something about it being his fucking condo, bangs on the door hard enough to rattle it against my forehead. I pop the security chain. He barrels in, talking super quick, sentences compressed, like he has a vital secret to share and only a few seconds to do it. Wearing a rumpled flat-grey suit, tie off, collar undone, jacket unbuttoned. Have to admit, he’s growing into the suits. Skulks from the kitchen counter to the sliding glass doors and over to the bedroom, smashes a fist into his palm, grunts, spits.
I ask how he’s doing.
Clint tries to speak, stutters, kicks the chair in front of the TV, shouts holy shit Marky it’s on!
“Want some food? Breakfast?”
Clint blinks, dumbfounded. “Huh? Breakfast?”
Pick the cast-iron off the floor, toss my smoke in the sink. “Yeah. Morning? Making eggs.”
“Morning?” Teeth-grinding sounds from across the room. “Don’t fuck with me, Marky. You…” Clint winces, staggers against the wall like I shot him, covers his eyes. “Are you…fucking naked!”
I lift the cast-iron. “My pad.”
“Ugh! Prick out? Put some…fuck!”
Dig in my duffel bag, put on a pair of boxers. “All I said was hey, want some—”
Clint lunges, faster than I hoped, and he’s in my face yelling fuck you Marky bullshit breakfast I know when I’m being screwed with I said it’s your time to shine! Stuffs some cocaine up his nose, laughs, slices his hands through the air like a video game karate dude, does a few jumping jacks, breaks into a wheezing cough, asks for a smoke.
Hand him the pack. “Whatever then. I’m having a boiled egg.”
Put the dirty cast-iron in the sink. Pour water in a pot and set it on the stove. Dig a thumbnail into an orange.
Clint watches me peel the orange, then, triggered by some hidden affront, tries to sweep-kick me in the head, falls against the fridge, howls, drops into a lame-ass martial arts fighting stance, says, “Peele crazy dawg dude looks clean but the guy can party, paaar-taaay.” My brother does a few clumsy dance moves, laughs, then a half-second later looks angry enough to rip my guts out. “Tried calling you asshole you didn’t pick up you should’ve seen this yacht! Big shot owns it, picked us up in Coal Harbour, hot tubs, fucking themed rooms and—get this! A scavenger hunt to get the secret codes to get into the themed rooms to get the girls! This is us now man, thug life. Yacht owner, fuck’s his name, runs a mega internet-gambling deal. Shoulda seen him, whole posse follows him around like that show Entourage but only not his buddies he’s got lawyers hackers accountants designers top-notch security and of course bitches bankers investment advisors fawning over him, coolest shit ever, his architect for this oceanfront pad he’s building on some private beach pissed him off and we almost tossed the egghead overboard. Come a long way!”
Check to see if my water’s boiling. “What room you pick?”
Clint sticks his finger in the corner of his eye, blinks, swats at something I can’t see. “Fucking hell that orange stinks.”
“Was there an outer-space room? Mars? Cuz that’d be cool—”
“Ugh, that orange-stink is killing me. Saying you better answer when I call.” Clint’s face lights up. “Where’s that puke? Twll? He around?”
Drop an egg into boiling water, put an orange segment between my teeth, strip the tough pulpy membrane off, spit it in the sink, eat the juicy orange capsules while my brother makes a disgusted face and what I’m thinking is no way, not the kid, not a word. “Ryan? Nah.”
Clint checks his phone. “Fucker’s not answering. Hey, last time you saw him?”
Wash my hands, not psyched about turning my back to my brother. “Dunno. Day is it?”
“Dayzit? Uh…”
“…uh…fucking…uh…um…” Bust out laughing.
Clint roars, lunges across the kitchen island, snags my arm. Blood leaks from my brother’s cracked lips; his pupils are black pinpricks floating in yellow-grey swamp. I’m guessing right now Clint doesn’t even know who or what I am, only that he wants me ripped in half. But he’s also weak and hungover so I pivot, slip away, rub my arm all pretend-upset. “Fucking hell, bro. Joking? Chill.”
Clint smacks the marble countertop, seems not quite happy with the effect, does it again. “Simple question. Answer me! My condo, all I get is you—”
“Saw him yesterday at work. Same as you. You called him to the truck, remember? Here. Piece of orange?”
“Course I remember! I mean since…last night? He come here?” Stalks to the window, cracks a blind, winces. “Lightweight. Shoulda seen him on the yacht, out of his head, might’a fell off?”
“ ’Kay. Piece of orange?” Waving half the orange at my brother.
“Piece of—fuck sakes! You see him, liar dope fiend, you tell me. Got it?”
Crack the softboiled egg, say sure, I got it.
Clint gives me a look that makes me hear burning metal hissing and popping. “What I’m saying is you were right about when I went all pussified and you said hey, brother, you gotta go all the way in to get out. With Peele? That was warrior-style. Needed to hear it. Easy to daydream about the simple life. But that’s gone. We’re way in now.”
“We?”
“Course. You and me. Like old times? Gross, Marky, first the orange and now that fucking egg, I mean, get some real food!” Clint tries to light a smoke, but the lighter outsmarts him. I snatch it, light a smoke, take a drag, hand the smoke to him, pocket his lighter.
“Marky, dude, lighter?”
I eat a few raspberry gummies, ask how far we’re in.
“All the way. Lighter!”
“Why?”
“Lighter!”
Drop the lighter in his hand, watch him almost lose it again, begin to feel the Oxys kick, wondering if I should offer Clint some vodka, maybe we spend Friday hanging out on the balcony getting shitfaced—
“We’re going to kill that bitch, is why.”
“The Reed daughter—”
“No, no, no, Marky. Stay on point! Not her, we need that one, the Reed girl’s not for killing. That Bansal sister I told you about. Tired of her. Told her to fuck off the other day. Don’t think she’s gonna listen.”
“You told Peele about you and Amar—”
“Hell no. Do I look like an idiot? Peele’d make me kill her, then kill me and you. She’s up to some bullshit, is all. Why else she at Marigold?”
Pour Clint a glass of water. He looks at it like it’s sewer sludge. I shrug, drink it down. I’m standing behind the kitchen counter, watching my brother pace through the condo. The light softens his features, the edges of his body, makes him appear immaterial. I think I’m saying goodbye. I hope he is too.
Clint reaches in his pocket, sets something on the counter.
“Fuck’s that?”
“You know exactly what. Your all-time favourite.”
Don’t even have to look. Settled on this beauty when I was ten years old and me and Clint were hanging around the Chilliwack mall scoping blades in the army surplus store. It’s a seven-inch, matte-black KA-BAR United States Marine Corp combat knife, carbon-steel clip point.
“Take it,” Clint says. “Got it for you. Want to see you holding it.”
; I make no move to touch the blade. If I’d left the balcony door open I could probably take a run and push my brother over the railing. But it’d be a risk. Clint’s built lower than me. A hard man to unseat. Now he’s digging in his coat pocket again. Pulls out a camera, says, “Okay happy days here it is. Nice work with the basketball kid. He led us to the Reed daughter’s boyfriend. Hannah? Horny Hannah!” Clint laughs, shakes the camera in my face. “This shit gets out…yeah, that politician’s mom’s gonna wish she stayed in the kitchen…but oh man Marky you gotta see this…sixteen and a freeeak…”
* * *
Call Ryan after Clint fucks off, leave a message telling him there’s no work today but he can meet me in front of the condo in half an hour if he wants cash for the days he worked. Course he’s there when I go down, leaning against the wall, messing with his phone, hoodie tight around his face, wearing sunglasses despite the cloud. I hand him an envelope, ask what he’s doing this weekend and I guess he forgets he’s trying to keep his face hidden because he looks up and I see he’s rolling a mean black eye. I’m about to say hey what’s up but he brushes me aside, says he doesn’t need a ride anywhere, vanishes down the street and I’d like to be the guy that presses the issue, runs after the kid, offers to help, kindness, all that. But I’m not.
Instead I spend the rest of Friday morning doing a horseshit errand for Vincent Peele: muling two suitcases to the HSBC office building downtown on Georgia. Clint knows I hate ferrying crap around, but Peele called after my brother left and said it had to be done. He also said I did good work with Sebastian Price and that soon—possibly as early as tonight—it’d be time for me to deliver druggie old-man Reed a fuck you. I told him fine, though the whole thing’s shit. I googled Carl Reed and he seems like a dickbag, but the daughter? Dunno. Sixteen. Doesn’t sit right. Best case is Reed uses his head, convinces his politician wife to fold the province’s bid for the North Van property. Worst case isn’t worth a thought.