The Beggar's Garden

by Michael Christie

  Faces swing into our orbit and out again like comets, trajectories forever altered by Oppie’s generous crack policies and philosophical musings. He is electric and alive. His interest is insatiable. Lecturing as he walks, he relates mind-bending scientific concepts with ease and grace. We are a team. Although nobody recognizes him, I feel proud to be partying with such a distinguished man of science. Prostitutes approach him and he respectfully tells them he has no interest in “erotic labour” but gives them rocks and kind words. He is a gentleman.

  Sitting on a bench in Pigeon Park, we form an accidental alliance with a Native kid whose face, crusted with glue, is making sad and sluggish approximations at consciousness. Oppie is offering him the pipe, but I don’t think he even sees it. Oppie blows out a hoot and continues with a conversation I wasn’t sure we were having.

  “Take this young man, for example, Hank. Here is a fellow theoretician, a physicist; he studies zero as we infinity. He’s asking the same question we are, but he’s approaching it from the bottom up, beginning with base assumptions, attempting to divide everything by zero. And as you well know, it is at these extremes, these margins, these points which a curve will avoid like poison gas that things really get interesting!”

  “You can call it whatever you want, I guess, Oppie, I think he’s just trying to kill himself.”

  “Oh no, not kill.” He is scratching under his shirt collar. “Destroy, Hank—he seeks to destroy himself.”

  When we leave, I turn and see that the kid has managed to stagger after us for a few blocks. But he can’t keep up.

  Oppie ducks into a corner store to buy more cigarettes. I’m straining to remember what it was Oppie actually did as a scientist. I know he made the bomb, but I’m not sure why or when. I can only remember his picture.

  I decide to ask him when he returns. “Oppie, when you were working at the place in the desert with all the other scientists, all working together like you talked about, did you imagine making a better life for people in the future? I mean, did you wonder about how things would be for them?”

  He spins and grabs me by the neck of my T-shirt. His hands are weak and the cherry of his cigarette dances millimetres from my face. “I want you to listen to me very intently, you smug son of a bitch. In our minds, the Krauts could have dropped one on us at any time, understand? We never had any idea what was going to be done with it, is that clear?”

  I lie and say it is.

  Later, we are on the bus because Oppie wanted to “experience the authentic transport of the proletariat.” The bus seems to have cheered him up, so I ask him where he lives and he says he’s been sleeping between the stacks at the university library. I ask him how a genius can die of smoking-related throat cancer and whether he knew it was bad for him, and he tells me to stop tormenting him. I want to ask him what it’s like to be dead, but I don’t want to push it.

  “Hank, I feel crack cocaine may affect you in a profoundly more negative fashion than it does me,” he says a little snidely. “I believe it has permanently altered your judgment.”

  Sometimes I do worry about lasting damage, tracks laid down that can never be picked up, that sort of thing. I often try to remember what it was like to not know what the crack high feels like, and I can’t. In this way, crack rewrote my history. I remember my mother, who quit smoking cigarettes when she had me and said she dreamed of them almost every night until the day she died. Even when we ate chocolate-chip cookies in bed while watching TV, she would tap the cookie with her index finger after each bite, ashing the crumbs carefully into a little pile on her plate.

  “Don’t worry about me. Just hope it doesn’t run out,” I say to Oppie, hoping it won’t run out.

  A woman with a baby is sitting across from us and I wonder why the baby is up this late. Oppie plays peek-a-boo with it for a few blocks by hiding his face behind his hat. Then Oppie lights a smoke, takes a big drag, and blows it right in the baby’s face, chuckling as the woman freaks and we get kicked off the bus.

  Back on the sidewalk, I notice Oppie’s smile has become strained and his face bleached. He insists on carrying all the vials himself, and he has begun to mutter. His walk has warped into an exaggerated parody of someone trying to walk with confidence. I wonder if he is a ghost and whether ghosts get the same high. I try to imagine the goings-on inside his brain. What an instrument to be flooded with so much cocaine! His mind is like a Ferrari entered in a demolition derby. He mutters something about the “allure of alkaloids” and then something about someone named Prometheus and a vulture and a rock. “You want more rock?” I say, and he nods like a little boy. I need to keep him away from people for a while.

  We run out of rock shortly thereafter, and I try to convince him we should slow down. Oppie pulls out a roll of bills like the cavalry and hands the whole thing over to a man whose face I will never remember.

  “Hank, I think this new batch of stones may be cut with something vile,” he says later, glancing at me suspiciously.

  When I shut my eyes there is a dioramic theatre of brilliant neon, and I have resolved to keep them open so as not to lose Oppie if he starts to run. We’ve ducked into a doorway shielded from the street by a tiled staircase, and in a further effort to slow him down, I suggest maybe he should try to cook up a rock on his own for once.

  “Well, that certainly contravenes the terms of our agreement, Hank, now doesn’t it? I supply the goddamn rock, you the steady hand and experimental know-how! Isn’t that it?”

  He is starting to yell again, so I don’t press the issue. We smoke more and I hold the pipe. I’m saving the better hoots for myself because he doesn’t really need them, and because he is starting to annoy me. He begins kicking the bus shelter in front of us with his leather boat shoe, over and over, trying to break the glass and laughing insanely. When I tell him they are made of shatterproof glass now, he says he knows that, although he doesn’t stop.

  We find ourselves back in the park that isn’t named after him and I’m beginning to think Oppie is losing his mind. Occasional forays into madness are, from what I understand, pretty standard for a genius, but this seems to be of an assortment darker and more potentially irreversible. He is mumbling in a heinous amalgamation of the many languages he seems to know. His teeth are yellowing and his fingers are blackened from gripping the charred pipe.

  Aside from the playground there are a few trees and a brick structure on the perimeter of the park, but mostly it’s just a field. Oppie is rocking back and forth, staring into the park’s dark centre. I’m thinking about whether this is the highest I’ve ever been and conclude statistically it must be, but somehow I feel clear and alert. Could there be an upper limit? A cap, like terminal velocity or supersaturated solutions? I figure we need more data. I can see my room from here, and although I want to go home and read my book, and although I know there is probably already enough resin in my pipe to keep me high at least until tomorrow, I resolve to stand by him, to ride it out; that is, if it can be ridden. He needs me.

  He hasn’t said anything for about an hour when my scientific thoughts are dispersed by his voice, raw from smoking and disuse. “By the mere existence of this city, would it be safe for me to assume the Cold War went all right, Hank?”

  “Yeah, it went okay, Oppie.”

  “Oh good,” he says, clearing his throat. “That’s good.”

  Discussion

  At the country-and-western karaoke bar, it’s me, Oppie, and the woman who told her boyfriend not to break my collarbone, our beer glasses hydroplaning around a small, slick table. She is wearing Oppie’s porkpie hat in the flirtatious way some women grab and wear men’s hats, perched on top of her hair like she is balancing it there, her neck stiffened, hoping the novelty of it will provoke a new appreciation of what’s beneath.

  She is smoking too many of Oppie’s cigarettes, and I want to tell him she broke my collarbone and watch him rise to my defence, reducing her to tears with a bombardment of scathing quips. I decide against
it. She and the beer seem to be providing Oppie with some kind of ballast, amnesty from the psychotic twister in his mind.

  Earlier, after we’d left the park, Oppie scampered into a dense patch of traffic and disappeared. When I found him he was a few blocks over with this woman on his arm. This place was her idea. Oppie introduced me as Professor Hank. I scoffed when he said it, annoyed by how proud he could still make me feel.

  The karaoke microphones have been monopolized by an old drunken couple who have feuded, proclaimed, wept, reconciled, and so far barely made it through a single song without one of them regressing to a bout of screaming “I fucken love you!” into the other’s face. Somebody said the guy who runs the karaoke got bottled a few hours ago and went home.

  I’m in the bathroom now, hoping Oppie will be there at the table when I get back. Everything, even the ceiling, is wet. The urinal is ancient, a stainless-steel trough. I’m pissing and it sounds like a sink. This is the kind of place where the line between beer and piss is blurry and rusted out, where one seemingly unifying golden liquid soaks everything, spewing and slopping from spouts and cups.

  I look at my steaming face in the dirty mirror and I come to the grim conclusion that I have to smoke more rock or go home. I consider stealing the stash and making off, but this seems too fiendish, and plus I think he could find me anywhere.

  I return to the table, where his arm is around her and she is talking. “They named that piece-of-shit park after you, huh? If you ask me, sweetie, there shouldn’t be a public square inch in this neighbourhood.” Oppie is smiling and vacant. He carefully finishes his beer and rises weakly from his chair. She turns to me and asks if she has seen me before and I tell her to shut up. Oppie mounts the stage and the old couple unexpectedly surrender the microphones to him. He brings them both to his mouth at the same time and begins.

  “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, my name is J. Robert Oppenheimer and I’d like to thank you for this opportunity to speak before you this evening. I want to commence by buying everyone in the house a beverage as a sign of my esteem and gratitude.”

  No one cheers because no one is listening. A synthesized slide guitar strikes up the next song.

  “No takers? Good, because I’m all out of money, which means there are only a few ivory nuggets left between me and something dark and unknowable.”

  Oppie clears his throat. Someone yells something in the crowd, but it’s not directed at him.

  “Crack cocaine, ladies and gentlemen. Some believe only the truly unhappy enjoy it, or rather need it. However, this hypothesis seems flawed. I have found its benefits extremely promising, but sadly not without cost. Like most things, it is a good servant but a bad master. Thus I believe control to be paramount, wisdom and knowledge trumping blind fear and temperance. To speak of regret is to ignore realities and inevitabilities. Humanity, my friends, must experiment—that is its nature. Want versus need, nature versus nurture: these questions seem redundant, boorish. Knowledge cannot be outlawed. It must be doggedly pursued! Alas, eggs are broken, unfortunate experiences are experienced, but, however, in my opinion, humanity is stronger for it.”

  No one is listening. Oppie sways feebly in the awful stage light. His hair is grey and sparse, his cheeks hollow and triangular. He looks so different now from my science-book photo. He is pacing the stage, compulsively touching and scratching his face as he speaks. He looks like one of this neighbourhood’s regular discarded men, who in a dirty tweed suit is taking an unscheduled narcotic vacation from the drudgery of his blister-packed medication.

  “And so I stand before you, yet I am dead of throat cancer, as my colleague pointed out so perceptively earlier this evening. How is this possible? Who can say. What is possible is that if I go to sleep I will never wake up.”

  I wish he had a lectern, something to put his hands on.

  “Therefore, I must conclude, further study is merited. And I must forge on—like Currie, with radioactivity humming in her oblivious cells—with courage, conviction, and a deep, unshatterable hope and faith in the value of this experiment. And for this greatly undeserved opportunity, I humbly thank you.”

  The woman, still wearing his hat, stands, clapping proudly. When he gets back to the table I ask him if he wants to leave, to go back to my room and just talk science and smoke cigarettes. He says I haven’t heard a word he’s said all night.

  Conclusion

  We are in the parking lot next to the bar.

  On the street, the car is waiting for Oppie. It billows grey smoke as it idles. A sheet of paper taped to the back window indicates it is insured only for today. I know her boyfriend is behind the wheel, but I don’t look in because it doesn’t matter. Oppie is leaving.

  “We are going to go and appropriate a few computers from the university library and sell them in an effort to procure some powder cocaine that Brenda here is going to cook and formulate into some real pure samples, genuine freebase, no more vials and uncontrolled specimens,” Oppie says as I load our last rock. I want to tell him to stay, but I am too tired and confused and plus I don’t really want him to.

  He does not ask me to come with him and I do not want to go. I’m worried I will regret it. I’ve never smoked real freebase. Someone else will be helping him now and they will probably do a better job than me.

  I hold the pipe to Oppie’s lips a final time. He exhales and his voice is a scoured whisper. “Well, that’s the last of it, Hank. You truly are one of the finest minds of your generation. How I’m going to miss your steady hands and gentle flame.”

  He is really tweaking now, his eyes drifting inquisitively to pebbles on the pavement, his shoulders and arms whipping restlessly like he is trying to get rid of something disgusting taped to his back. As if he is trying to shed his body entirely.

  The car is honking in the street and I’m going to cry.

  “These people are not scientists, Oppie.”

  “No, but they can help me—they know things, my boy.”

  “Were you serious about worrying you’d never wake up?”

  “I guess so, Hank. I’m not sure. Crack may not be the panacea, but I enjoy it like nothing I’ve ever experienced. I refuse to stop. Not now, not when I feel I’m so close to a breakthrough.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t take better care of you.”

  “Nonsense, I planned for all this to happen.”

  He touches my shoulder and it twinges painfully. He says, “To be frank, I think the world in which I shall live, from now on, will be a pretty restless and tormented place; I do not think that there will be much of a compromise possible for me, between being of it and being not of it.”

  I watch him get into the car and he is gone again.

  The Queen of Cans and Jars

  Her younger sister, Wanda, called that morning to ask if she wanted to move into her coach house. “What’s a coach house?” said Bernice. “It’s like a smaller version of our house, but on our property,” Wanda said.

  Many years ago, when Bernice was still in the shoe department at Woodward’s, Wanda was hired as a medical secretary by a brutish orthopaedic surgeon, owner of two of the hairiest arms Bernice had ever seen. They wed after six months of secretive courtship—naturally, there was already a wife—after which he treated Wanda to a smorgasbord of plastic surgery and whisked her off to Kelowna. Now they spent half of the year in Dubai while he, in the twilight of his career, girdered together the bones of the inconceivably rich and she chased golf balls about an island of irrigated turf in the centre of the desert. Wanda called weekly when back in Kelowna, speaking mostly of wine tours and the chore of locating good-quality home furnishings for their expansive lakeside palace, which Bernice had seen only in photos.

  Sitting at her kitchen table, Bernice imagined a series of houses cracking open like Russian dolls, smaller and smaller until the last revealed itself as a tiny pink stucco matchbox.

  “What would I do there?” she said.

  “Relax?”

 
“What about the store?”

  “Oh, haven’t you been doing that long enough?” “And where would I put my things … in this … coach house?”

  “Well, of course you’d have to downsize,” Wanda said.

  This new word chafed Bernice like ill-fitting slacks. Downsize seemed so smug and perniciously simple, as if the physical evidence of one’s life, and the space it occupied, could be erased just like that.

  “I couldn’t. Why would I leave? I’m comfortable here, and there’s so much to do,” Bernice glanced about her apartment, eyes landing on just a few of her beloved things. Wanda called her stubborn and Bernice said she’d think about it, immediately steering the conversation to the custom walnut deck for which Wanda was suing a contractor for poor workmanship, a saga her sister would never resist retelling.

  On May 14, 1978, while sorting laundry in the basement of their building, Bernice had found a dry-cleaning ticket in the pocket of her husband’s trousers. She stopped into the cleaners on her way to work the next day and exchanged the ticket for a green evening dress with a mink collar, almost twice her size. She laid the dress over the kitchen table that evening and waited in the living room doing a crossword. Gus came home from work and entered the kitchen. She heard his keys on the counter. She heard the icebox open and close. Then, without a word, he left their small apartment. She waited up, but he did not return, that night or any other.

  Some weeks later she quit Woodward’s after twenty years there and set up a thrift shop just three blocks away in the basement of New Westminster United. She began by handing out the sweaters and slacks Gus had left swinging in their closet to some old down-on-their-luck drunks and went from there. Shortly after she left Woodward’s, the department store slid into decline, and she liked to imagine it was due to her absence, though it was probably the malls and ever-bigger stores she’d heard were going up all over. Woodward’s finally declared bankruptcy in 1993, and with it died the last reason for decent people to come down to this neighbourhood, once the teeming commercial hub of the city, now staggering deeper and deeper into the woods of poverty, neglect and despair. All the old businesses on Bernice’s block had long vanished, swapped for cheque-cashing places, pawn shops and convenience stores. Over the years, through her thrift-store window, she’d watched the crippled loggers, hobos and drunks—battered leftovers of the city’s industrial heritage—joined by the heroin junkies, who were joined by the crack addicts and then by those suffering every other variant of destitution. It became a neighbourhood at which people in their downtown-bound cars gawked like they were on safari. She’d seen social services come and go like occupying armies, stuffing her mailbox with their optimistic, densely acronymed brochures. Most of them seemed out to get the poor wretched people more money, which to Bernice was much like heaving a thirsty man overboard, but she tried not to judge the social workers either. They were all trying their best.