On the Up

by Shilo Jones

  “Have you? On my jobs?”

  “Only weed. Gonna fire me?”

  My soldier shoots his in the face. “I don’t know.”

  “Cuz it’s not really up to you.”

  Not super psyched on the kid’s smartass tone. “That right? Who’s it up to?”

  “Clint.”

  I’m glad we’re not facing one another. I don’t want him to see my expression. “Think so? My brother owns Redline, but these are my sites. I hire and fire.”

  “You can boot me. Clint has other jobs. He’ll put me on one of those.”

  I’m wondering: why the rock-solid sense of job security? “Why would Clint go out of his way, against my word, to keep you on? When I tell him you’re a total fiend? Had to call me to rescue you—which, by the way, a thank-you wouldn’t be out of line.”

  “Thanks. Was amped is all. Shouldn’t’ve called. Especially since you’re ruining my Friday night doing this shit.”

  “What shit?”

  Ryan doesn’t look at me. “Power-tripping bullshit. Like you don’t get high. I see you with those pills. High all day. High right now.”

  “Had my leg half blown off.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  Something got ripped out of me, too.

  The game ends. Ryan hits reset. We’re both reborn. I decide I’m done playing. The rain makes a pattering sound on the windows that gets louder when a gust of wind swoops in. I think about the wind whipping through cedar and hemlock trees out in the woods, picture the condo windows exploding inward, glass piercing skin, take a long swig of beer, decide I’m gonna cut the kid loose. He resents me for helping him out, hates I saw him weak and fucked up. Fine.

  Across the street, in neighbouring cubbyholes, normal people are cooking dinner, watching TV, chatting on their phones, relaxing after a long work week and the lines of the cityscape are gridded, severe and sterile, goal modelled, reminds me of a computer chip.

  “How long you been doing it? Not drugs. The other thing?”

  Ryan manoeuvres his soldier up a flight of stairs, kicks in a door, hurls a flash grenade. Death cries from the OPFOR targets hiding in the room. Ryan’s soldier leaps from a second-storey balcony, lands, ducks and rolls, slips his combat blade into an OPFOR soldier’s spine.

  “Are there places you go? Spots? I dunno…corners?”

  Ryan slides a glance in my direction. “Fuck off.”

  “Nope.”

  Ryan’s soldier bludgeons an OPFOR to death with a chunk of concrete, which means he gets to take the dead soldier’s AK-47. “Fucking finally I got a real gun. Look out, bitch, elite special forces killer DEATHDREAM on the hunt!”

  “Ryan?”

  “Really? Can’t we just play the game? I fucked up I’m a shithead I’m sorry you’re way better than me, there.” Ryan’s solid with the AK, sinks four rounds in my soldier’s chest. We start over. I light a joint, hand it to him. He smokes it for a while, hands it back, says, “There’s usually a somebody. Like I know somebody and he knows somebody and there’s a party, usually, not a big party but a few people.”

  I hit the joint to make the twisting in my stomach go away. “You don’t have to do it. You make okay money.”

  “DEATHDREAM,” Ryan yells. “On the warpath.”

  Stuttering pain-pressure builds behind my eyes. There’s a somebody. Limp to the sink, take a sip from the faucet, slide on my ass because my fucked-up leg starts quivering. It’s guilt, is what it is. The pain in my leg should be gone by now. That’s what the military docs say. They tell me the pain is gone. It’s in my head. Ghost pain. Pain that’s not real but still hurts, and I’m like: Split hairs much? Because that’s a pretty fucking iffy ontological distinction. Doesn’t even allow me the satisfaction of suffering legit pain. The military shrink, fuck him too, says it’s manifested guilt. Which I’m beginning to think is maybe not total bullshit. Because I should’ve known we were driving over that IED, should’ve sensed it somehow, sensed the hidden OPFOR fingering a cellphone detonator, yelled STOP to the VC, STOP THE LAV. I don’t know how I should’ve known…but why didn’t I? Because the fact is I don’t have feelers. I took a drag of my smoke even though it’s against the rules to smoke in the LAV, you can do it if you have a cool vc, and next I was crawling from a cage of red-hot metal and burning tires and black diesel smoke, too shocked to scream, spitting blood and sand and a brown guy, fuck, an Afghan local ran into the smoke and flame, held his kufi over his mouth and nose and pulled me away from the burning LAV. He ran in and rescued me even though the OPFOR likes to detonate secondary charges to kill first responders, people trying to help. That local Afghan guy, some stranger, not a saint or perfect because no one is, just some guy, a son or brother or husband or father, a fucking person, he pulled me out of the flames even though I was leaking shit through my pants and I stank like shit and blood and oil and money and war and whiteness. What I did to the guy trying to rescue me is I almost shot him dead, had my hand on my Browning 9, almost shot that fucking Afghan right there in the dirt with my shit-filled pants and black-smoke sky and the LIGHTROAR, we summoned it like gods. I almost shot that Afghan because I thought he was dragging me to a pit in the ground to cut my head off, make me famous just by dying, and the Afghan man saw me reach for the Browning and ran away betrayed. I’ll never see him again, say sorry, say thank you. The LAV gunner and the vc didn’t come out at all so why didn’t I sense the bomb, a fucking buried pressure cooker filled with nails strapped to decades-old unexploded ordnance, uxo, maybe our ordnance, what a laugh, UXO OXY, all our fancy warplanes, all our buzzing drones and those two guys, good enough guys, fuck what were their names, melted skin, flesh to metal, kids piled against factory doors, please tell me their names, meat and soft bits is all we are, meat and nothing else, ghost deaths, fed to something, can’t hit reset and why can’t I remember their names, please my brother hold me I love you and please my brother you didn’t do that, not to this boy, this child—

  “Twll means hole,” I whisper. “It doesn’t mean bro.”

  “Dude you playing or what?” Ryan yells over the exploding video game noise. “Your soldier’s standing in the open like a jerkoff. Find some cover. I could’ve killed you ten times, easy. Clint was right. You’re a whack-job, but you’re not even cool. You’re a total pussy.”

  “That right?” I drag myself out of the kitchen, pick up the game controller, move my soldier behind a stack of cinderblocks, swallow. “When was this? What Clint said? When you guys were—”

  “Fucking partying, yeah. Last night. Glad you weren’t there. Clint said he can’t believe you went to war. Said with soldiers like you no wonder we keep losing.”

  “Clint’s my brother. He’s allowed to talk shit.”

  I let the threat hang.

  “But he’s right. Look at you. High all the time and not even for fun. He owns Redline. You don’t own shit. Not even a truck.”

  I remind myself the kid’s venting. “I guess I don’t own much. But look. I asked you. If it’s not for money, why do it?”

  “Money never hurts.”

  “Of course it does.”

  “So you gonna fire me?”

  I sigh. “No. But I tell you this. Phone me strung out? I’m not your mommy. You had a tough go. But know what? You’re making choices, friend. Bad ones. Choices with consequences. They’re yours to face.”

  I keep my voice lean, but it feels shit, saying I won’t help the kid. He’s fifteen. My life growing up wasn’t roses, but it was nothing compared to what this kid’s been through. But there it is. I toss the game controller on the floor, tell him there’s a pizza in the freezer. Ryan ignores me.

  Grab my Therm-a-Rest and sleeping bag and head out the door, pausing in the hallway to listen, see what’s up. I’ve been keeping an eye on these condos. The mail, parking spaces, lights. Walk down the hall, wondering which one to use. I push through a fire door, take the stairs up one flight into another identical hall, which leaves me with a not-cool sensati
on like I’ve doubled, become my own doppelgänger and now I’m sneaking up on myself, about to stab myself in the back. But that doesn’t happen, and instead I find unit three thirty.

  Stand with my ear pressed to the door for a few minutes, working on slowing my breathing. Nothing. No one home. Door’s locked. Crank the handle, slam my hip where the deadbolt penetrates the frame. A splintering sound as the cheap frame rips apart and then I’m inside, examining the damage, making sure it’s not too obvious.

  The condo’s dark except for rectangular patterns of light shining through the windows and stretching across the living room. An unearthly silence made even heavier by the rain lashing the windows. Smells of carpet glue, drywall dust, fresh paint. I do a quick search. No furnishings. No food in the fridge. Hasn’t seen a human soul in a long time. Maybe never even lived in. Eat, fuck, die. Never that. No money in living.

  Drop the sleeping bag and Therm-a-Rest on the floor. Head back into the hall. Close the door quietly. Three potentially empty condos on this floor alone. Fifteen floors. Lots of empty units.

  Time skips and stutters, drops me into the alley behind Clint’s condo, soaked, walking close to walls, slinking, scowling. I find who I’m searching for a block away, huddled in the bushes in a concrete planter box outside the MacMillan Bloedel building on Georgia. The building’s deep-set, gridded windows tower overhead, a brutalist fantasy in concrete and glass, the architectural equivalent of a billy club in the face. The homeless guy’s soaked, covered in layers of flattened cardboard and scavenged plastic bags, his eyes glassy and uncomprehending, so filthy he looks caked in soot, reeking of sweat and sickness, maybe even infection. It takes me a half-hour to talk him from his sort-of shelter. He’s not wearing shoes. His feet are swollen and covered in sores. He says shit like who are you and please don’t hurt me and I shush him, tell him he’s safe, that I’d never hurt him, not someone like him, hand him a lit cigarette, talk to him in a quiet, measured voice, like I’m calming an animal caught in a leg trap.

  During this business I’m not thinking do-gooder thoughts about how kind or generous I am or about what an amazing thing I’m doing. Truth is the guy disgusts me. He stinks, he’s filthy and piss-stained, wretched, cast aside and beaten down. He cowers as I sit on the edge of the concrete planter box in the darkness and pouring rain talking to him about fuck all, and when he reaches out to touch my shoulder I shy away, say what the fuck don’t touch me.

  Truth is I want nothing to do with him.

  Which is why I’m out here, fighting that ugliness in me, confronting it, sucker-punching that nastiness, struggling against the disgust this guy makes me feel for no other reason than I’m human, ugliness is in us, we have to fight it.

  My thinking on tonight’s mission, its meaning and intent, is crude. I prefer it that way. Professionalism reeks of death. Necrosis. The fully formed, already known, and already spent. In the twenty-first century everyone is forever being right about everything. Give me the freedom to be passionate and wrong, to mistake a Hallmark card for high art. Give me the amateur, the hobbyist, the dental hygienist who spends her weekends taking photographs of red-barked arbutus, the welder who secretly writes prose poetry, the administrative assistant who sculpts soapstone. Give me creation in all its banal, perpetually worthless glory. Give me bad ideas, incomprehensible logic, misplaced aims, theories shot full of holes. Give me failure, make me suffer its joy.

  It takes another hour to coax the vagrant into the empty condo.

  He looks around the room, blinking, probably feeling lost, suspicious, afraid, not sure what happens next. Truth is neither am I. We’re in uncharted territory. I tell him it’s cool, he should try and get cleaned up, not make a nuisance of himself, how long he makes it here before the cops boot him will depend on him. He drags a blackened fingernail across the pristine countertop with an expression like he’s been beamed into a starship. He might only get a single warm night. Maybe he’ll get a week, a month. Who knows? The point is he’ll get something. He walks into the bathroom. I head for the door, not expecting thanks, thinking the guy’s likely too stunned to speak, but as I slip into the hall I hear him running a bath. That night I bring three more in from the rain and when I return to the condo Ryan’s gone, not sleeping on the balcony but really gone and I sit alone and naked outside, glaring into darkened condominium circuits while the rain stings down.

  Jasminder Bansal

  On the night he died, Amar texted, said he wanted to show me something, said I should dress nice. He’d been out of our apartment for several years. Mom refused to see him, or said she did, but I found out later from Sim that she was still taking Amar’s money to pay our bills. I refused to judge her for it; Meeta had other opinions and made sure they were known.

  Amar parked his silver Cadillac SUV outside our apartment. I hurried to him, stepping around puddles, feeling anxious and slightly ridiculous, which was always how I felt around my brother. I wore a long overcoat to hide my floral print dress; I didn’t like the fabric, how it clung to my skin.

  It was early evening. The clouds were stalled over the ocean in a broiling line, cavalry awaiting command. Amar reached to hold my hands, his customary greeting for family and close friends. He was always the physical one, quick to bear-hug and tousle and rough-house. I spent my childhood swatting Amar away, or laughing and squirming out from under a tackle. But that night I was glad to have him hold my hands and lead me to the car. Glad just to see him. It had been months.

  Amar had begun to feel like a stranger. He’s changed, family friends would say, if they said anything. This is not our Amar. And the newspapers? I’d stopped reading them. Stopped watching the news. Which was difficult, considering I was saving up to apply to Langara and knew I wanted to study journalism. A gang war, everyone called it. A terrible breed of gangster. Bold. Vicious. Another daylight shooting in a leafy Vancouver neighbourhood only blocks from an elementary school. Cut to an image of a cherry-lined street cordoned in yellow tape. Cut to an image of the Downtown Eastside. Cut to an image of an RCMP officer standing beside a table heavy with cocaine and automatic weapons. Cut to an image of my brother rolling gold and a custom suit, or a tattooed Vietnamese rival wearing aviators. The problem was right there, if unspoken: the immigrant gangsters had gone public, started overstepping themselves. At that time the province was the largest producer of black market marijuana on the continent. Everyone knew there was a vast amount of dirty money involved, and that the dope was being traded across the border for hard drugs and automatics. Which was fine as long as the enterprise involved white growers in the interior and white bikers stabbing each other in strip clubs. But throw a brown kid in the mix?

  Now we have a problem.

  You want to be seen, little sister? Amar used to say. You have to bring down an airplane. Shoot a man in a mall parking lot. Then they pay attention.

  * * *

  He was right. My brother got noticed. Amar couldn’t walk down Robson without being called out—either by a fan or a rival. I don’t think he realized he’d adopted a role laid out for him in advance. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Gangster. Criminal. Terrorist. Different paths leading to the same place. Maybe Amar really was that person. Murderer. Maybe I still refuse to see him. Maybe I refuse to see him in me.

  * * *

  Amar discovered fame can feel like a shield. A nothing brown kid finally commanding the spotlight. The more attention he received the bolder he became. But it was a lie. Fame only made him easier to murder. Made his life into reality TV ritual, his death a prime-time exorcism, a superficial cleansing of the corrupt body politic.

  “No one steps now,” Amar said as he eased the Cadillac to the curb. “I’m known.”

  Everyone in line at the club turned to watch us. I held my hands clenched on my lap so my brother wouldn’t see them shaking. Amar was wearing a glossy, cream-coloured suit. Gold chains and rings gleamed against his skin. It was his trademark look, cobbled together from movies and music videos. Half pimp, h
alf investment banker, all high roller.

  “Amar,” I said. “I don’t want to go inside.”

  Amar paused, slung his arm over the steering wheel, glared at the crowd outside the Euphorium, said he was worried about me being holed up in that apartment. “Start calling your shots, Jaz, instead of letting motherfuckers call them for you.” A white guy wearing a black T-shirt with a rhinestone skull emblazoned across the front tapped on the passenger window. Amar lifted two fingers from the steering wheel and waited until the guy wandered off. “See that? Fuck that guy. Year ago he wouldn’t have nothing to do with me. Now I’m in demand. Most people let the tide carry them. You want to be like everyone else? School, debt? What do you want?”

  I remember thinking of Sim.

  I tried to say something to sum up everything I was feeling in a way that wouldn’t destroy the last of what little relationship we had. I thought about telling him, right then, about me and Sim. But maybe Amar knew. Even then, on the last night of his life.

  An unfriendly fist thumped against the Cadillac’s hood. Amar’s expression changed instantly. “You want to be a good Western Paki girl?” he said, sneering. “Go to school because everyone says you should, get married, wear a sari, spend your days hunched over a karahi, make nice with the whites? A fucking mouse. Spend your life wondering what you could’ve been? Haven’t you heard a thing Mom’s said?” Amar smoothed his hair, laughed at the people waiting in line. “I haven’t waited to get into this dump in three years.” Then his voice went cold. “The hate I can handle. Being ignored I can’t stand.”