The Beggar's Garden

by Michael Christie

  Sam said he would, then suggested he book a few days off and fly out for the weekend.

  “Oh, don’t bother, we’re so busy here …,” she said, and when Sam insisted, her voice congealed. “Sam, this is hard to say, but I think I need you there right now.”

  Sam fell silent. He could hear some electronic debris on the line, a distant titter, and he wondered whose provider was responsible.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but we’ve just been so isolated in Vancouver. And I suppose I’ve been reconnecting with my family. I do have a family, remember?”

  “The same oppressive one you were trying to escape by dragging us out here? Or have they been swapped out?”

  There was a moment of quiet, during which Sam fought to corral his breathing.

  “Sam, I’ve begun to suspect that either you or I is horribly unhappy,” she said next, “and I’m afraid it may be both.”

  “I was happy,” he said, feeling simultaneously witty and petty for the emphasis.

  They’d been married eleven years, and Sam had long ago regretfully concluded they were a disagreeable species of person, fundamentally speaking, a reality he’d resigned himself to and was willing to endure. The years had cruelly revealed in Sam and Anna the very qualities they’d so zealously sought to conceal with copious amounts of false self-advertisement on those pivotal first dates: she, controlling and anxious; he, over-critical and distant. But Sam had always secretly believed that the death of their embellished fictional selves was inevitable and, ultimately, forgivable. They were things built to dazzle, then to be shed and to fall away like the fuel tanks of a space shuttle.

  So it had mustered in him an acute sense of betrayal when she disturbed this functional truce to declare their unhappinesses. Yet even during the spiteful salvoes he made on her memory nightly, he couldn’t dissuade himself from admiring her bravery.

  “Sam,” she said in a broken voice after a few hollow seconds, “it’s simply that I … I’ve realized I’ve become someone that I think I may loathe.”

  “Can you put Cricket on?” Sam said, circling the kitchen island with brisk strides.

  When Anna informed Sam that Cricket was out crosscountry skiing with her cousins, Sam, more sternly than he’d have liked, took it upon himself to offer an itemized verbal summary of the errors she was right then committing in arriving at this decision. Though outwardly independent, she was at heart an impressionable woman, vulnerable to another’s interpretation of her feelings, and Sam had always secretly feared it had been this ability of his to articulate how she felt, and what she needed to do to fix it, that had drawn her to him and kept her there. And for the bulk of that night, he lay in their bed reviewing his points, each of which was unquestionably true, then concluded that perhaps it was their overwhelming cumulative effect that had caused her to hang up with a delicate, jaw-like click.

  The raccoons must have moved on, because when Sam’s clock radio went off it lifted him from a fitful sleep. It was a Monday. He rose with a lead weight in his body and stood at the small window that overlooked the garden. It already bore signs of her absence: weeds sprung amidst the vegetable beds; the rhododendron petals gone the nauseated hue of tobacco leaves; a defeated wither over everything. She’d always neglected to instruct Sam on the operation of the system of taps feeding the intricate vasculature of punctured hoses that wound about the yard. Despite the feminist outpost she dutifully occupied after the second bottle of wine at dinner parties, she was a woman who believed in household domains; she stalked the kitchen, laundry room, and garden like a wolverine and was determined to keep their secrets from him. Regardless, he’d begun to enjoy the garden’s slow ruin and found himself compulsively checking forecasts on his phone.

  He unplugged the clock radio from the extension cord, plugged in his shaver, and held the buzzing instrument to the wilds of his sleep-puffy face. He coughed down a few pieces of ragged multigrain bread, went out to his car, and pulled one of the dry-cleaner bags from the trunk. After moving out, he’d gone and bought five cheap suits, one for each day, the boxy polyester kind his father had worn. Relieved of the counterbalance of family, Sam’s life had tipped wildly into the realm of his office. He was a director in the fraud department of a major bank, his main responsibility being to oversee and ever-update a byzantine formula through which each transaction was run, designed to detect any manner of banking irregularity. He’d heard from the old-timers that his job used to entail tracking down real flesh-and-blood con artists, cheque kiters, and crooked tellers. Now nothing near detective work was involved; if the formula flagged any statistically anomalous event, a follow-up was made by call-centre employees from a contractor in New Brunswick. Ones that didn’t check out, the card was cancelled and the money replaced; ones that did, the card was reactivated. In either case the formula was adjusted accordingly.

  Initially, his rise at the bank had been rapid, the position in fraud conceived by higher-ups as merely a way station on his ascent to more crucial departments like corporate finance or strategic initiatives. But Sam enjoyed fraud, the puzzle of it, the meticulous attention it required, this endless struggle to reduce loss, and politely refused the next two promotions they put before him.

  That morning Sam sat through a gruelling project management round table on cheque security initiatives during which his head dipped twice. After the meeting he retreated to his office and redrafted a presentation he was to give at the national conference in Montreal the next month.

  At lunch, he walked from the shadowy narrows of the financial district to an area consisting mostly of language schools and tiny eating establishments. Crossing Dunsmuir Street, he saw ahead of him on the sidewalk a young girl a few years older than Cricket, her face bright at the heart of a tempest of dark curls, walking hand in hand with her towering father. The sheer discrepancy of their heights was oddly delightful to Sam; the notion that two people could exist at such differing altitudes seemed immediately mystifying. Then an ambulance parked out front of a dollar pizza place whipped alive with lights and a piercing cluck of siren. Sam saw the girl recoil toward her father, setting her feet on top of each of his, nestling her back into the space between the solid timbers of his legs. They all watched the ambulance roar away, its on-board control somehow flipping lights green as it went. Sam was struck by the tenderness with which the man held the girl and the automatic way she’d sought him. They stood for some moments, the man whispering at her hair where her ear would be, until her face softened and they set off.

  Sam went inside Top Choice Donair and ordered a falafel to the bracing sound of Arabic dance music, then stood on the sidewalk to eat. When he finished, he started back toward his office, balling the tinfoil wrapper tightly in his fist. He detoured into an alley, and after sidearming the foil into an open dumpster, he set both of his palms flat on the brick wall beside the bin like he was about to be searched and emitted a long, grinding sob.

  The girl had brought back the way his daughter sought him in these situations of distress—not her mother, whom she consulted first in most other matters—the way she produced staccato blasts of sound and stood, arms outstretched, limp as a scarecrow, awaiting the vault into his arms.

  “You all right, fella?” said an older bearded man, about ten feet to his right. Sam traced the man’s arms down to his belt and realized he was urinating with surprising force. Sam removed his hands from the bricks and said nothing. It had always seemed overly intimate to conduct a conversation with a man relieving himself. The man zipped and left the alley. Sam noted he was still pulling choppy, hot breaths high into his chest.

  Emerging from the alley, he was met by a cold drift of exhaustion and decided to walk home. He started east. He and Anna lived in Strathcona, the oldest residential neighbourhood in the city, besieged in recent years by the young, progressive, and wealthy, who sought to live within bike-commuting distance of downtown and could stomach the neighbourhood’s close proximity to the riotous and hellish, but strangel
y contained, slum of the Downtown Eastside, through which was Sam’s shortest route home.

  They’d married after grad school, he with an MBA and she a law degree. She passed the bar and did four months at a corporate firm in Toronto before discovering her complete lack of interest in the legal profession. Her family was appalled by her decision to quit, and at one point her father hinted that he might want reimbursement for the schooling. The west coast had been Anna’s idea of an escape. A few months after they’d arrived, an old friend offered her a position at a production company that specialized in American made-for-TV movies and commercials, and in a very short time that had led to her job as a casting director. At first, the city had been thrilling—as if their adventurousness, their willingness to scuttle the past, had been rewarded with their own earthly paradise, a temperate garden way out on the golden fringe of everything, far distant from the entanglements of her family and the yawning absence of his. Yet as years ticked by, something about the city nagged at Sam’s prairie sensibilities. Its beauty now seemed to him almost obscene, as if to build a glimmering city of glass by the sea, at the foot of an Olympian rack of mountains, was to invite calamity. And over time this doomed neighbourhood he walked through had assumed a symbolic station in his mind, an unsightly eruption that the city somehow deserved and couldn’t conceal. Much like his new backyard home, it was a tortured, unsettled dominion—a living monument to all unwanted things—and some part of Sam hoped it would be there forever.

  He made his way past dismal blocks of vacant storefronts where sickened, twitchy people congregated like Antarctic penguins. He was offered drugs by palsied men who seemed nonplussed by his lack of response. He passed a vacant lot where two men stood over a large collection of VHS tapes laid out on a blanket, each holding the other by the hair, each pleading the other to let go.

  After he’d walked awhile, the sun darted behind a ridge of cloud and the air fell cool. It was then he came upon a man sitting on the sidewalk with a yoghurt container before him. He was the man from the alley, in his fifties at least, lengthily bearded and swaddled in a ragtag assortment of dirty coats and vests; at his feet was a cardboard sign:

  Spare Change? Drug/Alcohol Free, GOD BLESS.

  Sam feared the man had attributed his silence to some prejudice he held, so he approached and plopped some larger coins in his cup.

  “You startled me back there in the alley,” he said. “Not a problem,” the man said affably but somewhat confusedly, and Sam wondered if he’d been specific enough for a man who surely passed much of his time in alleys. He decided to spare him any further confusion and made a step toward his home.

  “I hope you didn’t mind me saying that you look somewhat rough around the edges,” the beggar said. His voice reminded Sam of metal put to whetstone.

  “Sorry?” he said, turning back.

  “I seen the look before.”

  “Look?”

  “The one you got. Like a light gone in your face.” Sam grasped for a response to this.

  “There’s this story around here, kind of a myth I suppose, about this fella who got hit by a police car and made himself a whole bunch of money, like seventy-five grand, for his damages, you know—broken femurs, skull, the whole shebang. He’s on welfare, never seen money like that in his life. So he steps out the hospital and figures he’ll have the biggest party anybody ever seen. He gets himself a nice suit and goes and buys all the drugs he can get his hands on and offers them to whomever and whoever he sees on the street. People knew there’s something screwy in his head, because of the accident maybe, or some other reason, but they didn’t care. He drew to him every nature of mooch, hustler, and wicked person there was, and of course this guy ends up broke after just three days, just the clothes they gave him in the hospital is all that’s left. He said to somebody that he didn’t care for this place no more and he’d decided to go on vacation. The next morning he walked on down to the docks and he hopped on the first container boat he saw. Well now, this boat ain’t bound for Maui, no sir, this boat turns out to be a non-stop to Alaska. So here’s this poor guy, just the thin grey sweatsuit they gave him and those cheap velcro shoes, no socks besides. So this guy sits there on the deck shivering and making a full-time job of freezing his ass off. Crew members walking past his little hidey hole, going inside the cabin and drinking coffee, listening to the radio and whatnot. But you know what? This guy? He don’t say nothing to them. This fella was so determined not to ask nobody for help no more that he went all sleepy and just froze himself to death right there between them stacks of containers.”

  Sam sustained the interlude of silence that the story seemed to require. “He would have been arrested if he gave himself up. Am I right?” he said.

  “I suppose. Wouldn’t have been much of a charge, just trespassing maybe, would’ve caught a beating from the sailors is more likely. But the meaning here is two things: sometimes a gift ain’t a gift, and sometimes people are just too iron-headed to go asking for help.” The beggar waved a blackened hand over his change cup like a tiny magician’s top hat. “Me? I’m not afflicted with that problem.”

  At this, Sam thanked the man, dug into his pocket, and dumped the rest of his change, a near handful, into the cup.

  As he started away something occurred to him, and he turned back.

  “Take some out,” Sam said.

  “What’s that?”

  “There are too many coins in there—it doesn’t bother me, but people won’t give because they’ll think you don’t need it. But don’t take them all out, because people won’t give to someone who no one else gives to—the same way people don’t want to go to an empty restaurant.”

  The man bloomed a sly, craggy smile that looked to be carved out of margarine. “You think I don’t know that?” he said, and scooped a handful of coins and began stuffing them deep in the pocket of his pungent coat.

  Sam woke to the sound of a shopping cart buzzing up the alley, which was now lit by a yellow array of moth-shrouded streetlights. He ordered a pizza and met the deliveryman on the front steps of his darkened house. When Sam handed him a twenty, the deliveryman commenced his attempt to retrieve the change from the pocket of his punishingly tight jeans. Sam waited five long seconds and the man hadn’t yet got a finger in.

  “Keep it. You earned it,” Sam said, and the deliveryman gave up, grinning.

  Back in his drafty abode, Sam thought of the old panhandler. He had liked him, his lack of pretence. It seemed to follow logically that someone with nothing left would also have nothing left to hide. It delighted him to think that his advice had helped him, even if only modestly. He’d also liked the easy way he spoke. His co-workers rarely told stories so freely, or of that nature—concerning the tragic events that so often befell a human being—and the ones they did tell, Sam always found trivial and hard to relate to. Not that he could truthfully say he found anything personally relevant in the strange tale of a broken, stubborn man freezing to death on a ship; in fact he’d found the story puzzling. Most puzzling of all was how the panhandler came to know the story if the man had died. Yet it had moved him.

  While he ate, Sam pictured the beggar wandering the roadside shoulders of Sam’s old hometown. It was easy to imagine him there—easier than it was to see himself there any longer. There, fallen men like the beggar parked themselves in the tavern to tell woeful stories and drink away their disability cheques, while above the sun fenced with a few unfortunate dollops of cloud in the giant sky. Outright begging was not something that was done, not even on the reserves. Sam supposed that street begging required the anonymity of a big city; otherwise, in a small town like his, what another gave could only be thought of as borrowed. Those who could not work or for whom there was no work were regarded with a solemnity by men like his father, who’d hired countless dazed-looking men for menial jobs around their house.

  Sam grew up with no siblings and his parents were now both long deceased, his mother when he was six, his father when he
was twenty-one—this while he was out east at Queen’s University. His father was an accountant who’d made his living filing returns for the various Indian bands outside their rural Manitoba town. He was a precise and generous man who detested error, most vehemently his own, and provided his services to the bands at deep discount. Few others would do the same, as he never failed to point out whenever, out of adolescent loneliness, the young Sam voiced his desire to move to Winnipeg.

  “These people need me,” he’d say. “They don’t know their asses from tea kettles.”

  Sam had grown up privileged, at least in relation to his peers, mostly the sons of wheat farmers, mechanics, and RCMP highway patrolmen, and had never been subject to the small-town inertia that had cemented their fates. Sam had coasted through high school with the coy detachment of a partygoer making a brief appearance before leaving for a more interesting and better-attended function. His eventual enrolment in university had been a resolute fact that had roots in a time beyond his recall, a certainty as closed to discussion as the subject of his mother, who’d died from a botched medical procedure and about whom Sam had never heard his father manage more than a couple of sentences.

  But at university Sam had his first glimpse of the iridescent sort of person only real wealth could mint. And Anna was the best of them. They’d met in a second-year microeconomics class. That same year, Sam’s father was killed by a stroke and Sam stuffed Anna into the resulting void. They spent every minute they could together. At first Sam was disconcerted by how easily she described her untroubled ascendance through childhood and into the clever and joyful woman she’d become. As Sam came to know her, he decided that hardship, economic or otherwise, did not bestow character, that in fact the opposite was usually true.

  Her parents and three sisters had greeted him with a cautious, incremental warming. Her mother was a self-described homemaker and her father was an engineer who’d made a king’s fortune in the eighties by buying up drained Albertan oil wells and using a method he’d innovated to wring from them a few more thousand barrels of crude. They lived in a rustic log mansion at the heart of a rolling plot of ranchland and engaged in an intricate schedule of family vacations, retreats, and holidays to which Sam had always felt not entirely welcome. The thought of Anna winding herself and Cricket back into their lives made him ill.