by Shilo Jones
Traffic’s backed up along Georgia, commuters heading to their holes, and by the time I park the truck I’m nearly an hour late and feeling wound up, wrecking ball. The day’s gone dark. Some sort of protest or festival going on at the art gallery. Hippies dancing and chanting. Hop out, grab the suitcases, minding my own business, wishing I’d put on a clean pair of jeans, wishing my skin didn’t feel so flimsy, feeling stage lights beam down, too hot, and the audience out there laughing but not in a nice way. Couples stroll by, yuppies dressed for success, hand in hand, meeting each other for brunch, and seeing them makes me think of Daree, which makes me think of Sarah, which makes me bite my cheek to stay on point for work, which puts me in a shit mood all around.
A tensed-up knot forms in my neck, creates a stinging pain around the left side of my face. I decide to call Daree once I’m finished delivering Peele’s suitcases. When a bomb explodes beneath your feet, you lose time. A minute, maybe five. Like blacking out from booze. And when your brain finally returns to normal temporal flow you’re somewhere and someone else. Changed forever. Maybe blown apart, maybe dead or wishing you were. Makes sense. But the trouble is: that’s what’s been happening to me since I landed in Vancity. Small increments of life gone missing. A couple seconds here and there, that I skip past, and there’s a jarring effect, like stepping off a moving sidewalk at an airport, and I get this goddamned pain behind my eyes, and the headache, and the sense that I’m living outside my real life and there’s nothing I can do to change it.
A group of ESL students totter past the Ford—Japanese, Korean, a couple Latinos from well-off families. Friends holding arms, sending texts as they walk side by side, giggling at their phones and nearly walking into telephone poles. A few are carrying shopping bags, and for a moment I think about Bangkok, sprawling shopping malls and skyscrapers built right beside sheet-metal shanties, men pedalling rickshaws through overflowing streets, the energy so different than this monstrous city, unpolished, infectious, potent, like something vibrant burst from the dirt, straining for sunlight, struggling, a place where it’s still okay to make mistakes. Here we don’t permit mistakes. They’ve been written out. Market-tested, refined. A young city, we never had the opportunity to form a richly sedimented history, the layers of culture and difference that collide to create something vital. Vancouver skipped the past. Went straight from sucking her thumb to being embalmed.
Now she’s being dragged through the streets, on display, bled out, stuffed with preservatives, sanitizers, disinfectants both modern and ancient while the townspeople poke at her dried flesh, marvel at how lifelike she is, gaze into her sparkling glass eyes, chanting, see, ain’t she pretty? Stunning! Lovely! And you either nod and say yes she’s the prettiest thing around or you slink off, outcast, afraid of what you don’t understand, wondering why no one’s bothered by the stink of natron and myrrh, cedar oil and liquefied insides. And as the corpse moulders, the devout rise ever more vehement in her defence, their lives invested and committed, fawning over her, shrieking look how pretty she is! how gorgeous! while her limbs rot off and her belly splits open; she’s hussied up real nice if you cover your nose and don’t look too close; the devout closing rank, with slitted eyes and mouths stretched for a feast. The chorus drowns out opposing sound. That’s what’s happening to me. There’s only one song in this town, and I’m not singing.
Which means I’m out.
It starts to piss rain. Toss Peele’s suitcases in the cab, put on a hoodie, crawl inside, feeling suspicious and vigilant about nothing specific. I’m a mess. Muddy work boots, stinking filthy jeans, rosy-red blood smears around my scabs. Lay down with my knees curled to my chest and my hands tucked in my hoodie pocket, shivering, freezing out of all relation to the temperature. Will I get back to Bangkok, deliver the money I’m saving for Daree in person, say goodbye in person? And with the thought comes guilt, because I have a mission, a defined target, and I’m already daydreaming about pissing off, and if I slink away and Craig Williams lives free and easy I’m nothing, I mean really nothing at all with no purpose at all, and right then there’s this huge need to you know hear someone, say something to someone, a few words, something honest and real, and I’m dialling my phone and Daree’s saying hello Maak is that you?
First thing I do to sort myself is dig a couple Oxys out of my work bag. I’m slumped across Peele’s suitcases, watching headlights on Georgia sparkle and smear through dirty light, trying to think of something soothing to say, then zip! an instant one-eighty in terms of mood and I’m feeling contrite, needy for this mother of my child, mother is all, sorry, that’s all I feel—
“Sarah?”
“Sleeping.”
“Better?”
“Still not good.”
“Me either.” A silence so long and not awesome I finally cave. “Say something.”
Nothing. Silence.
“Fuck sakes Daree I phoned—”
“Not for many days. We argue…”
Fiddle with the locked suitcase, try and remember how long it’s been since I called her. Can’t be that long? Day or two? “We argued yeah so what everyone argues get over it that’s what people do. Argue and fuck.”
“We only argue. You called last Saturday. Six days. You could—”
A headache starts up, focused on the side of my face that got smashed by the LAV, feels like getting stabbed with a screwdriver, time does that ugly skip-skip thing and Daree’s talking but I can’t hear and the Oxys aren’t doing shit and I’m cradling a suitcase full of that motherfucker’s filthy money—
“…going to go…”
“Go? You? No. I’m hanging up…hey! Fucking met someone? That’s why you won’t come to Vancity?”
Daree works at an internet cafe on Khao San, in Bangkok’s backpacker tourist slum; it’s where we met. She doesn’t answer. Bangkok sirens across an ocean or Vancouver sirens right here?
“Is it more money you want? I’m good for it, my daughter—”
“Not money. We want you—”
“—but I have money—”
“—back with us. Me and Sarah.”
Breakthrough pain. Super-severe new pain that confronts terminal cancer patients as they move implacably toward death. An unwell body becomes accustomed to a certain level of pain and a concomitant amount of painkiller, then the body goes FUCK YOU and the patient catapults to another level of suffering and another plateau, and this happens again and again and can also describe a life—
“But I have money!” I shake a suitcase, tempted but too afraid to open it, all this cash so close and I can’t have it and it can’t help.
“You’re not coming. You sound scared. Are you—”
So I hang up.
* * *
Dead-ended. About to crawl out of the truck when my cell beeps and there’s a photo from Vincent Peele showing Daree’s rundown pollution-stained apartment in Bangkok, then another of Peele carving a snowboard in steep rocky terrain with the message yo me crushing Horseshoe double black Whistler and a final image of Daree exiting her apartment with Sarah wrapped in a tie-dyed shoulder-sling I bought her in Krabi.
My phone rings. First thing Peele says is, “Ernest Hemingway?”
“You fucking hurt—”
“Oh, nothing to fret about. Chillax. More uptight than a Torontonian. You have la moolah? Unmolested and safely in la possession?”
Tell him yeah.
“So then. No worries, mate! Trace a phone call, contact an associate overseas—you like that Whistler photo of me trouncing the gnar? You ride?”
“No.”
“Been thinking about you. Flattered? This history of yours, university and war, the warrior-intellectual. Drawing historical precedent, came up with our man Hemingway. He dabbled in war?”
Take a sec to watch a cloud engulf an office tower, get my shit together. “High school. No university. Self-educated. Wasn’t a big deal back then, and besides, it helps if you’re brilliant. There are better examples.”
>
Shit. Fucker baited me.
“Ah…still. A potentially volatile combination?”
Across the street, at the art gallery, multicoloured protest banners are draped from fir trees and marble entry columns. The rain pounds in on an angle, making it hard to see, and through the headlights on Georgia Street the rain looks like static on a screen.
“Peele, fuck you on about? I got work, remember?”
“Bit of a romantic, that dog Hemmers,” Peele continues. “But my suspicion is he’s not your model. There’s an interesting relationship, historically, between university-educated intellectuals manipulating what could be called the working class.”
“Well, like you, I’m no intellectual.”
“A rare impulse these days, isn’t it? Class war?”
“War is only war, Peele. I’ve been swinging hammers for a long time. Never seen one glow with blessed revolutionary light.”
“No stormin’ la Bastille? The dream dies hard. Wait. Flowroom! Me refereeing the Ward Brothers cage match—”
Peele hangs up. I say fuck off to the dialtone, stuff the phone in my pocket, think about how best to murder him. Knock him out, tie him up, take him into the woods, sink him into concrete up to his knees, cut him, leave him for the cute forest creatures? Yeah, maybe that.
Climb out of the Ford, grab the suitcases, lock the doors, plunk a few quarters in the meter, glare at the protestors. Booths, covered in ratty blue tarps, are set up in a rough semicircle around a waterless mosaic fountain facing Georgia. A drum starts up, sharp, arrhythmic, inspires scattered cheering. I’m rolling the suitcases behind me as I limp toward the bank, wheels clunking when they hit an expansion joint in the sidewalk. Are the real people on the street looking at me? Do I stand out, filthy, unwashed, afraid? Can they sense I don’t have an inside?
At the front doors of the HSBC building, thinking of the working stiffs and cheap suits coming through these doors every day, diligently paying their outrageous mortgages and car loans, fretting about usurious credit card rates and the GDP and RRSPS and their kid’s tuition and taxes and gas prices and the stock market, passive versus active investment strategies, asset allocation and risk management, dividend tax sheltering, getting royally nickel-and-dimed if not outright stolen from and shuffling back for more, mostly honest and hard-working people, straight rubes and suckers, perpetually stooped, never in the know, making money for guys like Vincent Peele and his bosses, trying to develop a relationship with their banker in the blind hope he won’t fuck them, while I—bagman, thug, criminal, low-life, deviant—stroll through the front doors carrying suitcases stuffed with stinking blood money, money from ruthless international drug syndicates, from companies who purchase industrial waste and dump it in the ocean, from factories in Indonesia and Sri Lanka where employees are slaves in everything but name, money from pornography rings, from chemical-weapons dealers, from mining companies in Africa who send children down shafts like canaries, money from Western-backed despotic regimes and murderous dictators and jihadi terrorist cells, money from narco-warlords and corrupt officials of every description and nation, and the whole thing—not the bank or the city but the whole heartless, avaricious shebang—strikes me as ritually absurd, a violent, nihilistic farce, and before I know it I’m laughing so hard I can’t breathe, and my laughter rises to mingle with traffic noise and protest chants. Trying to choke the laughter down because people walking by are glancing in my direction and even though I don’t give a rat’s ass what they think this is still work, and I was raised to take my work seriously, even when it’s senseless, even when it is a farce.
Take a few minutes to get my head straight.
The protest chants and singalongs grow louder, more strident.
And the energy in that crowd, chanting in the rain just to be unheard, standing up for what they’re told to believe in; how cunning they were to misdirect us way back when, convince us peaceful resistance could effect structural change. The new idiot orthodoxy. Maybe Peele’s right. Give me two, three of those protestors, real committed, a bit unstable—
A banner strung up outside the gallery reads Affordable Housing Is a Human Right. Another I can only half see is about a single-room occupancy hotel on East Hastings. Same old story. We could’ve had this shit figured by now, if we really wanted to. But we don’t. Hippie reruns about my age wearing baggy hemp pants and shirts that hang to their knees have their hands linked together as they spin around the dried-up fountain, chanting and singing while others whirl fire poi, the red-orange orbs cleaving circular tracers through the air and ooh isn’t that pretty and oooh how cool is that and oooh I feel so alive and free!
Stagger through the bank’s front entrance, duck under a massive swinging pendulum sculpture cleaving the marble foyer, spot the side door Peele told me about. Punch the entry code, tug the handle. Nothing. Door won’t budge. Outside, the protest erupts in cheers. Cars honk in easy support. Try the code again, chest tightening, a cellphone signal…tear at the fucking door, shake it, thrash against it. A guard lowers his chin to his radio. Yeah I look like a fucking thief, a madman, nervous as hell because I have Peele’s filthy money and it belongs in this fancy bank with its gilded offices and ocean views. Both hands on the door, tearing and screaming while the protestors dance and sing. The security guard’s got a buddy with him, and right when I’m about to go straight out of my mind I see Peele’s play.
Motherfucker’s having a laugh at Marky.
Sprint outside, heart going wuuump way too slow despite how jacked I am. Stumble into Georgia Street. A delivery van hits the brakes. Side mirror misses my nose by an inch. Rush of blasting air, big HA HA at Marky, cars slamming brakes all around and I’m in the middle of the four-lane street ripping Peele’s suitcases open to get at the filthy money…and they’re stuffed with nothing but back issues of TransWorld Snowboarding, Fast Company, Canadian Art, the New Yorker, BIKE, Dwell, Wired, Artforum, Surfer, Fortune and I’m screaming punching laughing kicking in the middle of the street with cars swerving and horns blaring and a shattering crashing noise follows the first rear-ender and I feel Peele laughing at me, the city laughing at me while I smash my fists onto car hoods and drivers stare straight ahead both hands squeezing the wheel thinking oh god what is this I so don’t need this where are the police get off the street you loser reject skid derelict why don’t you just leave why don’t you just die oh my god I think I want to kill you. The violence seeping from the commuters washes over me, forces the air from my lungs, and all I can do is pace and pull at my hair and toss the magazines at speeding cars. They smash and scatter and torn pages whirl overhead and the whole shitshow makes the hippy reruns clap and squeal, real happy, far out, peace.
Jasminder Bansal
Brunch at Hawksworth. Mirrors and mahogany and a sculpted plaster ceiling, backlit, its curves matching the calla lilies placed on every table. I enter breathless, feeling undeserving, afraid I’ll be spotted, asked to leave. Vincent introduces me to the minister of the environment, Heather Reed, and her husband, Carl. Ms. Reed is a small-boned woman whose dismissive nose highlights the honed diamond pendant around her neck. She’s seated when I arrive and immediately gestures me beside her, then whispers please tell me you’re capable of discussing something other than business, unlike that boor Vincent. She says this loud enough for Vincent to hear while offering him her hand. Vincent fake-kisses Ms. Reed’s hand, says business is booming thanks for asking, introduces me as his most talented recent hire, a compliment that makes my cheeks warm. What’s the play, Jaz? That’s what Sim asked. I wish I knew. Not feeling terribly hungry, I order black coffee and a hamachi tartare, resolved to see this thing through after telling Sim to back off.
Ms. Reed orders a cocktail called an Income Tax, something made with gin and other people’s money. Everyone laughs but Mr. Reed, who stares out the window and picks his fingernails. Mr. Reed could use some sleep, a healthy meal. He’s gaunt, wearing what look like baggy pyjama bottoms and a faded denim jacket
, with a nose less hawkish than hooked. There’s something of the washed-up prophet about him, a sadness that separates him from the rest of the table, and I get the feeling Mr. Reed is a man who made the mistake of outliving his convictions.
Ms. Reed asks how I like working with Vincent. I smile, tell her it’s totally next level. Chuckles all around, which seems to ease the tension. I sip my coffee. Ms. Reed downs her cocktail, asks the waiter what he recommends for ten thirty on a Friday. Vincent interrupts the waiter, says it’s pouring rain, let’s drink Scotch, and Ms. Reed laughs and says you know me too well, young man, you’re a bad influence.
Vincent winks. “Bad in a good way?”
“Bad in every way.”
“I see. Carl? Jasminder? Scotch?”
I tell him no thank you. Mr. Reed doesn’t answer.
Cars slow for a red on Georgia Street. Vincent prattles about the LEED-certified beach house he’s building on Salt Spring Island until the waiter returns with drinks.
Vincent toasts an early and beautiful spring in Vancity, then explains, in his usual casual fashion, that the delightful Minister Heather and Marigold Group are locked in fierce competition for a very fine piece of development property being assembled in North Vancouver. My plate arrives. No one else has ordered food. Vincent asks Heather if the province has secured municipal support for her pricey taxpayer-funded venture. Ms. Reed raises her glass to Vincent, says of course we have, you smarmy bastard. Then she turns to me and asks if Mr. Peele’s unfortunate reputation is warranted.
Vincent pretends not to listen, runs a finger along the rim of his Scotch glass.
Everyone at the table studies me, including Mr. Reed—who blinks his bloodshot eyes like he’s having trouble keeping up with events in real time. I slide my fork through my tartare, try and marshal an accommodating smile. “I’m very excited to be at Marigold. I haven’t heard anything.”
“Damien Hirst sprinkled real diamond dust on that painting,” Mr. Reed interrupts, rising off his seat to point at a painting hanging over the bar, his voice blustery and hollow. “That ridiculous one right there. The heart? See it?”