Читать книгу Notice - Dustin Cole - Страница 9

The air felt like a cool hand on his throat. He went unhurried by some derelict benches next to a park. A guitar was out. “Play anothern,” somebody insisted. The guitarist closed his eyes, fingered a few open chords in silent rehearsal, then began to parse his way through “Wonderwall.”

Levett’s phone vibrated in his pants pocket. The caller was his friend John. He slid his thumb across the touchscreen. He heard John take a drag off his cigarette and it was like seeing him inhale the smoke.

“So whatchya gonna do?”

“You cuttin’ straight to that?”

“About what?”

“About the notice.”

“Any decision?”

“Maybe.”

“You gotta really think about this.”

“You think I haven’t?”

“Not a lot of money they’re offering you. Two and a half grand’s gonna go in a snap, and then what?”

“I never considered myself a gamblin’ man.”

“You’re a fighter. You never back down or take shit. You’re the last person I see bending over to the Lam twins.”

Levett felt it. His friend cared enough to reach out. “I’ve started grinding my teeth.”

“Really think about it. Twenty-five hundo is nothing in this town. That apartment’s a nest egg.”

“Lane’s willing to help.”

“I know, I met him at the last tenant meeting. Everyone in the building is on your side, Dylan, we got your back. You gotta fight this.”

“It’s a chance to get into grassroots activism, I guess. Sorta doesn’t gimme much of a choice.”

“Hell yeah dawg.”

“I’m not an activist, John, I’m an animal. Put me in a corner and I’m comin’ through you. But it’s still not a straightforward decision. Sometimes I just wanna get the fuck outta here man. Fuckin’ tech yuppie drones, the foreign capital, it’s wack. Craft beer bullshit. Affluent white trash.” He knew he could not escape all that. If he wanted to escape, he would have to fly to the moon.

“You gotta fight it, D.”

“Say I do win the arbitration, the notice is cancelled and I get to stay, like, hypothetically? The dudes above and below have accepted the payout. They’re gone. Mario’s gone. Hakim’ll be gone. If I win I’ll have the right to live in a construction zone. All that goddamn noise, John.” Levett imagined him twisting the end of his beard in thought. He heard a lighter’s knurled wheel rubbing on flint.

John exhaled smoke into the receiver. “I’m not lettin’ go, even in a situation like yours. I’d avoid the construction, go live up the coast in a cabin, do my research.”

“You and I have different aspirations. I don’t want to hide out in the woods. I’ve had my share of the woods.”

John guffawed. Levett passed under the viaducts, the swoosh of cars overhead. Someone drove by with bluebottle exhaust, silence hung from the other end of the line. “Okay, but, you know, be careful about this decision. That’s all I’m sayin’ man.”

“It’s an impossible decision.”

“It’s not at all. It’s easy. You’re a fighter—fight.”

“I may fight.”

“They’re gonna need awfully heavy machinery to drag me out of there. Wild stallions, yoked oxen, the Jaws of Life…”

Blade Girl did powerful backwards crossovers in the empty lane. As they crossed the intersection she called Levett a woman beater. He remembered confronting her, her staring at him, the rehearsed coquetry of it, the studied emptiness. He really regretted doing that now. “Woman beater!” she shouted again. He pretended not to hear.

A big dude with a shirt that said WISH YOU WERE BEER stood to the side glaring at Blade Girl, cellulitic gut hanging out the bottom of the XXL. He said, “Somebody should get a slingshot and shoot some marbles back into your head.”

Levett was smiling and chuckling about it. Lane wasn’t. “We should take a bus,” Lane said. “I think it closes at four and it might be busy. I still need to print out the forms.”

“I’m flat broke. Let’s walk down. It’ll take fifteen minutes.”

Lane silently assented. On a hoist in the bay window of Blue Star Motors, a blue Ford GT’s clearcoat flickered in the weak light. Below it, a white Lamborghini Huracán sat in predatory shadow.

“Is your bank around here? If we got a receipt with your total funds on it, we could get your fee waived.”

In his deep ditch of insolvency Levett cringed at the word “fee.” “My bank’s the opposite direction.”

“There’s other banks. Hopefully we can get a receipt. I think we still have time to submit anyway, if it’s not packed.”

Why did he say “I think”? Levett thought. Vaughn needs a good cudgelling, he thought, imagined the Lams in cement shoes at the bottom of the Fraser, tidewaters flushing out their eye sockets.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if this all descended into violence,” Levett said.

“I get angry hearing about it.”

Autobody. Autobody. A propane dealer. Fine mist with intermittent drops of rain that accumulated on his glasses. In muted colours the downtown skyline shifted upon itself, as if with mirrors and pulleys, revealing, occluding, like the magic lanterns of yore.

They stepped over a dead pigeon coated with maggots, wings askew, entrails oozing from its split breast.

Looming golden arches, scent of boiling canola oil wafting under their noses. Amidst their shopping cart truckage, a tableau of ragged men stood along the eatery’s disused patio.

In the viaduct’s shadow. Along the low, worn ledges and the slant of the stone embankment. A man approached pushing a plastic shopping cart, all the hard living readable in deep face-lines, his appearance an inventory of personal neglect: the illegible logo on his sweatshirt, blue jeans a glossy brownish black, toecaps blown out, ballcap pulled low over his eyes, ashen hair, nicotine mustache, snuff-juice mouth corners. A couple of pop cans rattling around at the bottom of the brittle cart illustrated his lack.

“I’ll try and get a receipt from these guys,” Levett said, walking into a BMO. The bank vestibule was all glass. He slid his debit card into an automatic teller, tapped the touchscreen and requested a twenty-dollar bill. The machine pondered for a number of seconds, its innards humming and clicking. TRANSACTION CANCELLED—INSUFFICIENT FUNDS flashed on the screen. His red debit card stuck out from the slot like a tongue.

“I see an ATM sign,” Lane said, pointing at a red-on-yellow sign reading Main Mini Mart. Dealers, peddlers and addicts milled about in front of a wrought-iron fence topped with fleurs-de-lys. A hooker slowly stepped onto the curb, her toes squeezed into a pair of high-heel sneakers. Slack belly, sore-ridden arms and thighs. It took her a number of seconds to get both feet from the street to the sidewalk. She was very stoned. Levett imagined her perceiving the surroundings as slow and receded, hardly touching her.

Two cheerful Indigenous men discussed who was going to buy off-sales at the hotel and who would go to the dispensary for weed and shatter.

Under a burnt-out marquee, a figure sat bent behind a rain poncho draped over half a cardboard box, doing cryptic activities behind the improvised shade.

A paucity of merchandise lined the racks of the Main Mini Mart. A woman in a black tank top stood beside the money machine struggling to pull on a fleece jumper, card in the slot and her balance visible in softly glowing white on a black background. More than me, Levett thought.

“Just a second,” she said.

He turned away.

Her man stood balancing a suitcase on the crossbar of a mountain bike in the corner next to the windows. Wide windows plastered with junk print thwarted the drear daylight.

She finished dressing and finished her transaction. They left together, man with bike and suitcase following woman with cash.

Levett slid his card into the machine. A disclaimer about the three-dollar transaction fee. He requested a twenty-dollar bill, heard a stylus skittering inside the machine. The receipt curled from a hooded slot. $0.00 Funds Available barely visible at the bottom of the printout.

“You can’t hardly read it.”

“We should hurry,” Lane said, looking back the way they’d come, toward the neoclassical edifice, a former bank now called Four Directions, an Indigenous job centre with a part-time Residential Tenancy Branch satellite office.

Around the corner on Hastings a security guard in high-vis apparel and a deer-bone choker talked to a man outside the entrance.

Inside Four Directions a security desk faced the entrance. The walls were painted a sandy colour; the wainscotting, rosettes and scrolls, a darker terracotta. At the back were niches with work tables, where the bank tellers used to stand. They walked around a corner to the left by a series of cubicles. At the end a woman sat behind an information counter.

“Where do we speak to the housing rep?” Lane asked.

“We don’t do that,” she spat back, nodding to a clipboard on the wall. Levett followed Lane back to the clipboard, wrote his name below other names.

They sat at a large round table outside the first cubicle. The security guard walked in whistling.

“How’s it goin’ guys?” he said, and they returned the greeting. He took off his sunglasses and said, “I wear these outside because sometimes people spit at me.”

Lane turned to Levett with an amused look.

“Not inside, though,” the guard added.

A voice rose out from behind the cubicle walls. Another voice made repeated attempts to confirm and clarify information. Levett flipped through one of the free dailies.

“I think I have time to run across to the Carnegie and print off the Application to Waive Filing Fee you need.”

“Thanks for doing that,” Levett said.

“Here’s a pen. You can fill out this one.” It was the tenant’s Application for Dispute Resolution.

He took up the pen and filled out his name and address in the boxes. Lane was gone about fifteen minutes. While he was gone, Levett listened to the official going over the proper steps his client needed to take for a successful arbitration.

A man had come in. He spoke to the guard about leaving the city. “I don’t do it, don’t want to be around it, don’t want to be around people that’re doin’ it,” he said, setting his palm lightly on the security desk with each point, the guard’s head nodding along. A north-facing sun penetrated the clouds, surrounding the two men in a corona.

Lane emerged from the flaring sunshine, took his former seat and began to fill in the other form. They waited there. The cubicle door opened and a woman exited.

The RTB officer picked up the clipboard from its transparent holder and read off the name “Loretta Tilbury.” He looked around. No Loretta.

“Dylan Levett.”

“Yes.”

“Come on in.”

He stood aside as they entered the cubicle, mostly desk, with three visitor chairs along the plain opposite wall. They sat down. The painted mouldings along the ceiling were visible above the partition. The officer was in his late forties, acne scars on his cheeks, a pencil moustache. He wore a sky-blue, short-sleeved dress shirt and jeans. Business casual.

“So what are we doing today guys?”

“I’m disputing an eviction notice,” Levett said.

“When did you get the notice?” he said, fingers laced on the desktop.

“I got it on, like, April twenty-sixth. It was issued on the twenty-first. I have the form here, but I need to get the fee waived.”

The officer’s head tilted slightly as Levett placed the ATM slip on the desk, its faint print all too real now. His hand moved across the desktop palm down, hovered above the slip, and took it up close to his face, said, “This is an ATM receipt, but you need two months of bank account statements. Not to worry, though, you’ve got time. Your submission doesn’t have to be in yet if you received your notice on the twenty-sixth.”

Lane leaned forward. “I just want to double-check that I can amend the application after it’s already submitted.”

The agent looked at Lane, at Levett, wondering about the nature of their relationship. Lane continued, “I’m wondering if I’m correct about being able to amend Dylan’s application with a statement and evidence.”

“The amendment is the evidence package, and that’s what you need in your hearing. The purpose of the form is to book a hearing. But you’ve got time to do that. And you need to go out to our main office to either pay your fee or receive a waiver.” The agent looked at Levett, then Lane, again at Levett. “Are you guys computer savvy?”

Lane nodded.

Levett scoffed.

“Well, I have to ask. Trust me, you’d be surprised, you really can’t assume.” He meshed his fingers on the desktop again. “Do you have a BCeID?”

Levett shook his head.

“Come on over to this side of the desk. I’ll show you how to get one, then you can register for a hearing online.”

As they stood up and shuffled to his side of the desk, the agent opened the door of the cubicle. They squinted at the sunlight reflecting off the floor tiles. He rotated his screen so it faced them, pulled his mouse and keyboard over, brought up the web page and scrolled down to the link: Register for your own personal BCeID.

“See that,” he said, and clicked on it. A new window popped up on the browser. “You can register with a driver’s licence, a passport or a birth certificate.” He clicked on Start Registration. “You can select your documents and continue on to your contact information.” They stooped in front of the screen nodding. “I understand this stuff is a snap to you young guys. It’s just that, you know, the government is going paperless.”

“Thanks,” Levett said.

“You’re welcome. Have a nice day, guys.”

“You too,” they said, suddenly outside the cubicle.

Her face was nigh perfect, something out of a Dutch masterwork, he’d told John. Spearmint-green eyes. Two rows of straight white teeth, an orthodontist’s deft handiwork, perhaps. Large enticing smile painted with tart red lipstick—the colour of alert, of emergency, the colour of exits and blood and the inner depths of remembered fire. After their first interaction, engineered by Levett, he imagined falling in love with her, played it all out vaguely in his mind: the West End apartment, the rescued kitten, an exotic holiday planned well in advance.

The cooks called her Kristine.

Instead of ordering his staff meal directly from the cooks, he went to the front of house saying he needed to look at a menu. Kristine stood at the corner of the L-shaped bar. She was doing cutlery roll-ups. She set a fork and knife at the centre of a napkin with measured intensity, folded one corner over the bottom of the utensils, rolled them in the napkin, and set the roll-up neatly with the others in a clear plastic insert for the dinner service. He liked the undivided attention she gave to each of her several duties, from punching in orders on the touchscreen, to tearing the receipt off the debit machine. She arranged the pint glasses on a round tray then poured water into them with a pitcher instead of using the soda wand. Efficient, he thought.

“Do you know where the menus are?”

She sidled around the L and leaned over to look at the lower shelves. She’s stocky, he thought, but curvy.

The invisible down on her neck and shoulders glinted in the afternoon sun coming through the patio atrium.

Her hair was pulled straight back in a high, tight ponytail. It was tastefully plain. She had a beauty mark, a small mole above her left upper lip.

He thought these things while attending outwardly to the plotted exchange.

“I’m bored of clubhouses,” he said.

“What about a BLT?” she said, leaning there with him, her head tipped sideways to read the vertical text.

“Too much like a clubhouse.”

“Reuben?”

He shook off the Reuben.

“Chicken tenders?”

“Not filling enough.”

“Goon burger?”

“Lasagna,” he decided.

“Mmm.”

By the time the cooks got to cooking his lasagna and he ate it, she was off work, posted up at the end of the bar next to the L. “How was your lasagna Dylan?”

He liked this attentive gesture.

The steam clock whistled its quarter. He sipped coffee in a wedge of shade. Shunting railcars behind him, their couplings clashing and echoing like titans at war. The diesel engines bawled. His ass got cold on the parking block. Halfway down the cup he went back inside, wondering if his team would advance to the conference finals. They had Connor, the best player in the world.

Vik cursed on the line, one bill up, two buns on the cutting board. The kitchen was dead quiet.

“What’s up?”

Vik shook his head, averted his eyes and, gripping a knife, darted back and forth from one side of the line to the other, to the grill and the cooler, to the toaster, back to the cutting board, grill to the cooler, accomplishing nothing.

A chain of bills came up all at once. Then he recovered. He tore up lettuce leaves to fit the burger buns, fanned sliced tomatoes over the lettuce, placed red onion rounds on top, spread Dijonnaise on the other side of the bun, laid Gruyère to melt on a smoking vegetarian patty with intent, lifted fry baskets from the spitting, popping oil, turned on tiptoe pulling three dishes from the top shelf with a long pair of tongs, arranged them on the stainless-steel counter opposite the flat-top, garnished each with a lemon wedge, a sprig of parsley next to a diced strawberry.

He rang the bell. At the sideboard he took a swig of cola, long since flat.

Vik walked over to the Hobart, levered the door open. Gouts of steam rolled out from it.

“Can I help you?” Levett said. He didn’t like people in his territory, small as it was.

“As if.”

“You seemed upset.”

“Want something to eat?”

Levett turned away puzzled.

The daytime bar manager Lowell swung through the kitchen door with a cordless phone to his ear. “No, we don’t reserve tables on game nights. It gets super packed in here, people line up to get in, we can’t even let friends save seats.” He hung up with an indignant thumb. “Fuck, people are stupid. We’ve never made reservations on game nights, like we’d start taking rezos for game seven. He shook his head in disgust, roughly pushing through the swing door without a knock of warning to staff who might have been on the other side.

Crowd thickening, increasingly raucous. Both teams faced elimination. Levett thought of the phrase “sudden death,” thought there was mercy and dignity in it while at the same time being utterly humiliating.

No sign of Kristine. It would have been creepy of him to check the servers’ schedule. He was tempted, went and checked it. She had the night off.

Portioning was written on the whiteboard beside his name. He slid the dish rack underneath the steel counter, squeegeed the countertop into the gaping dish machine, gathered a green toylike scale made of plastic, a box of clear freezer bags, and checked the portion-weight chart tacked to the kitchen wall. Seven ounces for onion rings.

He slit the case tape with the point of a scissor blade, pulled the plastic bag around the box flaps to expose the manufactured food. The frozen rings left a greasy film on his hands.

Vik would always reach around him for one-litre containers, or a whisk, or one of the large stainless-steel mixing bowls, muttering curse words at unknown targets. He would pace up and down the line shaking his head, return to the dish pit, something there he needed but he didn’t quite know what. He’d look around, walk away empty-handed.

Levett turned around, the short glowering cook’s face was five inches away from his own. Vik didn’t say anything though; he just stared like someone does when they challenge you to a fist fight, his cloudy glasses reflecting the overhead fluorescent tubes. Without a word he walked away.

Some minutes drained out of the shift, but not many, not enough. The kitchen started getting orders. A dirty container flew into the dish pit, hit the wall and spun on the clean stainless-steel counter.

Levett asked Vik what was up.

Something about whites. He went for a smoke. Levett heard the clash of trains through the open back door.

“If he keeps throwing shit by me I’m gonna hose him down with the nozzle.”

Jake laughed warily. An image formed in his mind, visible on his face, depicting the volatile consequences of this proposal.

“He really shouldn’t be doing that.”

“If he keeps doing that he’s gonna get wet. French fine dining background or not, I don’t give a fuck.”

Vik sauntered back onto the line.

“Don’t throw things by me into the dish pit.”

“Haha, sure, okay,” he said, smiling and nodding.

One by one, night servers arrived. A swelling din as they entered through the swing door. Anna came, a sweet haute goth studying fashion, from Russia, via Atlanta and Dallas. She had a Psychic TV stick-and-poke tattoo on her thumb.

“I can’t. Believe. How. Retarded people are,” Lowell said to Anna. “They might eat, they might have a drink, they might stay… fucking morons.” His tone was scalding.

Hoots and hollers. Game time. A low, ominous chant bled through the walls. During the playoffs the kitchen had seen a drastic increase in chicken-wing sales. Henry had written it on the board. The case lay in readiness on the floor of the basement cooler, bound with two plastic straps.

Levett lugged it upstairs, straps cutting into his hands. He mixed flour, salt, pepper and steak spice in a bus bin, grabbed a chopping knife off the magnet and cut slits in the two bags of tightly packed chicken meat, battered and trayed them, latex gloves soon caked with clumps of bloodstained flour.

The wings smelled of sick death. He retched, pushed it down, continued to batter and line them up horizontally, top to bottom, left to right, on the large baking trays.

He heard voices crescendo out front. Eruption.

The booming welter of voices faded. He went out to check the score. Out there it was orange and blue, orange and blue, orange and blue. Score one–nothing Oil. Lowell brought a full bus bin into the kitchen.

Back in the dish pit traying chicken, he heard rough, merry cheers out there. Even the women sounded masculine. He imagined not a goal, but an act of sanctioned violence. A punishing bodycheck, Plexiglas flexing and clattering, audience wincing on the other side of the warped pane, their mouths shaped into small Os, a player slow to rise up onto his skates again.

As he prepped wings, Levett wondered whether or not he would win the arbitration hearing, whether or not he had made the right decision. It was too late now. But two and a half Gs weren’t shit.

He finished one of the vacuum-sealed bags. He peeled off the caked latex gloves, dropped each into the garbage can and snapped on another pair. Clutching another tightly packed wad of poultry with fresh gloves, he felt the cold deadness, felt it in his palms and wrists, felt it pass through his elbows and up to his shoulders, his neck, down the spine to its base. He remembered walking by the chicken processing facility when he worked at the lighting shop, thinking of the veiled carnage inside, the zigzagging conveyor belts and the refined disassembly process, remembered the stacked cubic pens and a forklift driver wearing coveralls and a face mask with two cylindrical filters on the mouthpiece like that was how many you needed, in there. Stray feathers. Collar of a laundered t-shirt over his nose against the putrescence, the noisome effluvia, rushing past the bay doors, each time fording a sluice of rotten fluid, hurrying away, only to enter into the dain of a fish processing facility just up the street.

“Hot,” Vik shouted, bursting in with a pot of soup he set in the sink. He came back with a pail of ice he spread around the pot as a coolant. “Try this,” he said, and put a small bowl on the shelf by the solvents.

“What kind is it?”

“Bean and bacon.”

“Thanks.”

“Yeah buddy.” He sounded calm again. Chits chittered from the miniature printer. Anna called out orders. A lot of hot wings, barbecue wings, honey garlic wings, poutines and cheeseburgers. The front-of-house staff were slammed with food, beer and cocktail orders. Lowell walked in with another bus bin and slid it under the sink.

The crowd let out a cry of collective disappointment.

“Tie game now,” Lowell said.

The bar was at capacity. A line had formed at the door in vain.

Levett stuffed the bloody plastic bag in the garbage can.

As he crossed the line, Vik said, “Hey, I dare you to yell ‘Connor McDavid sucks’ through the door.”

They laughed. He was the best hockey player in the world. Everyone knew that. There was a consensus. Winged feet and the softest of hands. Not only could he skate fast but he could change direction laterally, instantly, almost teleport, doing things a human body shouldn’t be able to do. That’s what pro athletes are for, he thought. They do things physically regular folks can only imagine. Connor did astonishing things with the puck, all manner of deke, made defencemen look like they were standing still, turned goalies inside out. Here’s McDavid in full flight. Jersey parachuting. End to end. Scores. There was a massive eruption out front and it rose up in him too and he cheered without having seen it.

Anna brought some empty sauce bottles to the dish pit.

“Hey Anna, back in Atlanta did you ever hang with Gucci Mane?”

“He was my babysitter.”

“What about 2 Chainz?”

“We lived next door to him.”

“You ever meet Quavo?”

“Quavo took my sister to the prom.” She said it deadpan.

The shift wore on stagnantly, fryer hiss and patty sizzle, the dish machine groaning as if it housed everyone’s complaint, moaning along with the dull tinkle of nozzle spray on crockery, Levett squeezing, aiming, holding the jet on an area of baked-on cheese crust.

The rabble let off dismayed exultations every time the Oilers missed a scoring opportunity.

People stopped ordering food and committed themselves to alcohol. Anna and Vik flipped the kitchen, broke everything down to be washed, rotated the sauces. Vik scraped the dirty oil off the flat-top into a trough with a special black brick. The drain fed into a stainless-steel insert that made Levett shudder when it was taken out to be emptied and cleaned. He saw the grease slosh around and imagined the hair above his temples paler, his skin saggier and his clogged arteries buckling.

“Can you fill up sauces?” Anna said.

“Sure, I guess,” he shrugged, hated dicking around with sauce bottles at the end of his shift. He aimed the barbecue sauce in the squeeze bottle, wiped the threads with a damp paper towel, capped the squeeze bottle and the bulk sauce jar, then poised himself to direct tzatziki into an open squeeze bottle with a rubber spatula, thick condiment dripping down the sides. Curry mayo clung to the outsides of a squeeze bottle. You just had to hang the mayo-slathered spoon over the bottle mouth and let it cloyingly drip inside, the whole finicky task an insult to Bachelors of Arts everywhere.

Gulping once, twice, the dish machine fell silent. He pulled the last load of dishes out from its steaming maw. Then he changed. He wet his hair. He put on a hat.

He gathered his beer from the walk-in cooler. The large steel scoop lay on top of the ice machine. He shovelled cubes into the plastic bag. This is how he did it since they cut his power.

Pushing through the swing door he said good night to Anna and Vikram.

Anna said, “Night,” in a sweet voice. Vik stared and said nothing.

The pub was still busy. Blue-and-orange people sat wasted and crestfallen over their warm pints. Two yuppies sat in front of the soda fountain opposite where he was squirting himself an ice water.

“How’s it goin’?” one said.

“Not bad. Who won?”

“Oilers lost bud, didn’t you see it?”

“I was working in the kitchen. Maybe I could get a radio and listen to the games.”

“Pff, a radio,” the yuppie scoffed. “That’s a joke. Get a tablet. At least.”

“Too late now,” the other one said.

Fuck off, he thought.

Highlight reels looped on the big screen. One of the Ducks getting creamed. Instead of slowing it down, it looked like the network sped it up. He walked out onto the damp flagstones.

He delayed a cab crossing Water. At Cambie and Cordova a linguistic cross-section of the touristic species rose up from the Cambie’s patio: laid-back Brazilian Portuguese, backlander Austra­lian English, carousing High German—all mingling and dissipating in a pall of blue dopesmoke.

He went eastbound along a parkade and then by the film school. Up ahead the illuminated outline of El Choza’s cactus signboard. The traffic lights on Abbott and Cordova changed. Green to yellow, yellow to red in electromagnetic semaphore. A grey-skinned man pushed a beat-up stroller with a vacuum cleaner in the seat. Panhandlers leaned along the closed shops holding cardboard-and-felt-pen signage in their quavering hands. Unpunctuated messages in block caps. ANYTHING HELPS GOD BLESS. HOMELESS HUNGRY LOST MY GIRL TO FENTANYL.

A listless chattering throng gathered outside the Grand Union Hotel below the old hand-painted sign. Vancouver’s Favorite Country Music Pub in letters done to look like nailed-up lumber. Night people lurked in shifting permutations around the gaping bar threshold. Rail-thin hookers catcalled for dates. Scabby dealers straddled BMXs. Young couples trudged by in off-brand sneakers and t-shirts, dragging their feet, the seized wheels of coffin-sized luggage scraping behind.

Winged curses of frustration and desperation ricocheted off the buildings.

A hulking man sauntered through oncoming traffic to a leitmotif of car horns and squalling brake pads. He yelled over his shoulder in stride, “Right over there in the doorway, just go in, you’ll see him.”

Among a clutch of young adults smoking outside a club an elderly man held a floppy ballcap out for change. Hollow cheeks and puckered lips, no teeth.

In a corner store window across the street an open sign emptied and filled with cherry light. Next to the bodega people stood along a ledge with a chain-link fence peeled open at the corner, asking each other “where Frank was” because “he had oxies yesterday.”

A siren flared up and began to howl terribly somewhere nearby.

Fragments of dialogue accompanied his passage like bad scenery you only ever hear about: “She’s a fuckin dry cunt bitch”; “He took my scooter, five bills and my phone”; “Tell ’im I’m lookin’ for ’im and he’s gonna get shitkicked”; “Goof! Goof!”; “Don’t be fuckin’ favourin’ her.”

He continued eastbound. The vestiges of a narrow-gauge rail line embedded in the pavement ran blind from International Village and disappeared into a gated condominium terrace on the north side of Pender. At the base of the Chinatown gate a pair of foo dogs stood guard. They were decorated with aerosol names. Cree Thug. KAZ. Lefty. Someone had painted their eyes pink as if inside them were death rays charging.

A young burnt-out couple walked past. The man trailed the woman. He pushed a plastic shopping cart laden with their effects. Atop the load a guitar case had been secured with a length of severed electrical cord.

On Carrall a lady pushed a two-tiered shopping cart down the bike lane. It must have seemed to her like Levett was staring. She eyed him down, let out a bitter snort.

“Have a good night,” he said.

“Thanks.” Sardonic tone.

“It’s a warm evening. No rain.”

“That’s about it,” she scoffed. Turned west. The cart’s rattling heralded her long shadow, slanted upon the high concrete wall and moving inexorably forward.

Across the street, people were camped out on the benches along the soccer field. A man slept with his effects set out around him. No dog to sentinel. He looked to be in his twenties. A gaping mouth showed few teeth. His unwashed face wore lines of hard living. Of homelessness and crack smoking. Days without food. Like the titles of tracts about suffering.

Chinatown Plaza’s colossal neon sign burned scarlet and gold forty feet up the side of the parkade. Popping ollies echoed over the soccer pitch from the skatepark.

Headlight cones drifted along the viaduct.

He sat down to rest on the curved ledge at the southernmost end of the skatepark.

Overhead the hushed passage of cars. Everywhere there seemed a tranquil somnolent motion. The swelling clickity-clack of a train rose and died away as it dipped below the viaduct along a hedgerow and curved westward. A constant sweep of traffic on the boulevard.

Skaters cruised amongst the viaduct’s transverse columns trying tricks. Switch stance disasters to fakies, kickflips, heelflips, hardflips, bigspins and backside tailslides. All of them speaking an idiom he still knew. He used to be able to do the tricks too, but that was years ago. He wished he hadn’t quit. They were having so much fun. They were crewed up on a warm night, smoking joints and crushing beers.

He looked into the empty, illuminated expanse of the parkade as the soccer pitch floods went out one by one. The path lamps burned on. The only features he could make out in the distance were a guy’s bare folded arms and two triangular nostrils. A mangy bitch slept tits up on the dirt beside him.

Levett pulled a silver can beaded with condensation from his bag, cracked it and lit a joint. He poured a long draft of cold beer down his throat. A light breeze played on the damp of his neck.

Hardly audible urethane wheels on glassy cement polished by years of these same gliding wheels.

No birdsong. Pigeons didn’t count.

No sooner had he sat down than a lone figure in baggy shorts and a loose tank top coasted out of the shadows.

The skater rolled to the ledge and sat down adjacent to Levett. He had sharp Indigenous features. “You got a smoke?”

“Don’t smoke,” Levett said, took a hit off his joint, held it out to the stranger.

“That’s cool man.” He sat for a moment then spoke again. “It’s good to get out and skate anyway, relaxes me.”

“It’s a good outlet.”

The skater nodded, pushing his soaked hair back into thick spikes. “I’m livin’ with my parents right now. Well, my dad. I can’t wait to get my own place. Next month I think. I gotta move and then look for work.” His forehead was quartered by two lines of worry, an x- and a y-axis.

“You thinkin’ construction?”

“I thought about construction. Never done it, though. There’s cranes sticking up all over the place. Could be good.” He pushed his hair back again. “I’m from Alberta—Edmonton.”

“I’m Albertan.”

“I’m not originally from Edmonton.”

“Where else you live?”

“Swan Hills, Barrhead, then Edmonton. Edmonton’s rough though, fuckin’ gangbangers are harsh there. Doesn’t seem as bad here. I mean, over there,” he gestured toward that notoriously sketchy area two blocks away.

“People are alright,” he said.

He cut his eyes over at the skate posse.

“You’d find trouble if you were looking,” Levett said.

“I don’t know much about it. Moved out here with my dad a couple months ago. He was doin’ good for a while. I hadn’t really seen him in four years. Cuz he was all cracked out.”

Levett didn’t react. Not that he didn’t care.

“It’s pretty disappointing.”

Levett introduced himself. The guy’s name was Justin.

“You wanna beer?”

“I’d drink a beer.”

Levett took a cold can from the plastic bag and handed it over. A silver-plated bracelet dangled off Justin’s wrist, clinking against the can as he took it. The curved plate on top featured a red enamel hexagon inset with a caduceus. His forearms were dotted with cigarette burns.

“I’m allergic to bee stings, what are you allergic to?” Levett said.

“Nuts.”

“Cashews?”

“All nuts.”

“Almonds?”

“Every nut.”

“Even like, half a peanut?”

“I’d be on the wrong side of the dirt if I sucked on half a peanut. I can’t even be in the kitchen when someone opens a jar of peanut butter.”

He pulled out an EpiPen from a cargo pocket in his shorts.

“I’m supposed to have one of those.”

Justin put the needle back. He cracked his beer.

Levett looked up at the massive Ts of the viaduct columns, the faint seams where the form panelling touched. They diminished toward the stadium and the downtown core. There were ledges with coping built around the bases of the columns; a low, sharp wedge-like bank with a waxed edge people did salad grinds and bluntslides on. HOSER and LUTZ and G4N—Good 4 Nuthin’ Crew—aerosoled on the columns. An image of Satan rendered on the large bank. The paint wasn’t red enough. It looked more like a Minotaur.

“Did you work in the patch?” Levett asked.

“I had a couple oil-patch jobs. Insulating wellheads was the first thing I did. Then I did seismic. I filled in for a buddy on a service rig for a couple weeks.”

“I swamped on a picker truck off and on for five years, hauled drill mud for a winter. That sucked.”

“That fracking stuff is hard on the environment. All those chemicals contaminate the water. I don’t get it. We treat the earth like shit when really it’s—”

“A big machine—”

“A big organism.”

Justin jacked one knee up to his chest and braced his shin.

“Switch frontside pop shove-it,” a skater said and rolled out into the open with a beer bottle in one hand and a cigarette in the other to attempt the trick. The board shot out from under him and he landed on his ass, remaining there, palms flat on the cool cement, the bottle and the cigarette set down slightly out of reach.

“I can’t stand my dad’s girlfriend. All she does is hang around leeching off him. My dad won the lottery.” Levett was kind of tuned out, but this got his attention. “Like half a million.” Justin looked Levett straight in the eye. “It’s almost gone. He got it last year, no, like less than two years ago. Bought a big-screen TV. Did a couple hundred grand worth of blow. Bought a brand-new Dodge Challenger. Wrecked it. Ten minutes after he got it out of the body shop he wrecked it again. Then like, you know, everyday expenses.” He said it all smiling, but with a discernible warble in his throat.

Levett didn’t know what to say.

“And his girlfriend just sits around spending his money. ‘Let’s get some down,’” Justin mocked. “She’s a user. He’s just her next score. Doesn’t give a shit about my dad. Once his money’s gone, she’ll be gone. It’s good to get out of the house.”

Neither of them spoke. The passing train left its long weighty sound, its intermittent screeching.

There was a swelling clatter, not the train, but a desiccated man in Asics and black shorts who pushed a heavily laden Costco cart. Garbage bags bulging with aluminum cans hung from multiple points around the conveyance. Calves bulging. There were some piled quilts, a suitcase, a yoga mat, a tent, a folded tarp, a rolled tarp, a tankless propane burner. There was a plastic fan rake poking from the miscellanea of his load. He had a jouncing Budweiser flag for an ensign.

“Are you native?”

Justin nodded out of his trance, drank. “I got my treaty card. I can’t remember my number though. Kind of embarrassing.”

Levett relit his joint.

“Most guys know their number by heart, in case you lose your card. It’s like your social insurance number, you should have it memorized.”

“What’s your band?”

“I can’t even say it.”

Levett cracked another beer. There was one left. He didn’t offer it.

“It’s hard to remember, Kap… Kapaw… Kapawe’no, or something like that.”

“Do you miss your nation?”

Justin chuckled nervously, unsure whether or not he was being fucked with. “I got a couple friends are treaty, but I’m not really in touch with the culture.” He chuckled again, drank, set the can aside. Then, in all seriousness: “I just got a card. I’m just part native. It don’t mean much besides having a card.”

His skateboard rolled back and forth under his shoes, bearings grinding. He seemed to be watching the dark skyline for something that might turn up there.

“I’m gonna peace dude,” Levett said.

“Take it easy.” Justin sounded forlorn. He sighed. “It’s good to get out of the house.” He kept saying it, like he needed to remind himself, or he didn’t quite believe it.

Levett looked down at his bag. Ice water was draining from it. Over the coping down the ledge into the corner embroidered with litter. Levett rose with the dripping bag. They shook hands. Justin had a strong handshake but his hands had gone soft from idleness.

“What’s your name again?”

“Dylan.”

“Oh yeah, sorry.”

“Okay.”

“Later.”

“Bye.”

Levett sidled through a gap in the park fence and went on in the dank air, went on parallel with the elevated track. A cyclist pedalled by. There was a skunk sniffing around on the knoll next the parking lot with its tail erect. The lighted vertices of Telus Science World’s geodesic dome shifted gradients on a timer, from yellow to orange to red to violet to pink to yellow to orange over and over again.

He walked the promenade at the head of False Creek. A sailboat called Mizzy lay anchored in the black water, sail furled, cabin portholes shuttered. Science World’s red base feathered in the rippling water beside the vessel. A man with a fibreglass canoe over his head came by.

Another man chided him. “You walkin’ back to PoCo with that, Canoehead?”

“I live in the city.”

“Back to Walnut Grove,” said the josher’s girlfriend.

Levett laughed about that coming up the long hill.

A warm wind started up. The leaves of a weeping willow shimmered in the streetlight like a dancer’s hair.

Across the street he saw another skunk. Its back stripe blended with a patch of lilac, hyacinth and daisy, aquiver as it disappeared through the bush and the bars of a slender architrave that doubled as a shed for garden tools.

Cab drivers slept in their taxis on Main. He approached the Bellevue.

The foyer’s sharp light stung his eyes. Now they had installed a video camera above the elevator in the corner facing the entrance, and another above the main entrance facing the elevator. A ceiling tile had been removed above the elevator and a black bar with mounting holes speared down from the dark rectangle.