by Sam Wiebe
“You’re quiet tonight. Is everything okay?”
“Not really,” I say. “There’s something I want to talk to you about. I don’t know where to begin.”
“Sounds ominous.”
Another sip. “It is.”
“You want to talk about it now or leave it until after dinner?”
“Are you sick?”
“So we’re opting for now.”
“I think it’s possible you are unwell.”
The levity falls off him and he looks at me, exposed. There’s a sudden haggard cast to his features.
“Sorry?” And it seems to me he says it in such a Canadian way.
“Yes,” I say.
He dips his eyes to his lap. Then raises them to a point just above and to the left of my face. He is searching for a reply, for something to say. But he can’t meet my eyes.
“How could you tell?” he asks at length.
“I couldn’t. I didn’t. I found your stash.”
“It wasn’t out.”
“I dug.”
“Ah.” He drops his eyes again. I can’t imagine what he is thinking about.
“How bad?” I ask when neither of us has said anything for a while. The remnants of cocktails are whisked away. Wine brought and approved and poured. We are sipping that, largely ignoring the appetizers that arrive at the same time.
I see him consider my question then appear to decide to give up and give in. I have the feeling that whatever he tells me at this point will be the truth.
“As bad as you can imagine,” he says. It’s not what I want to hear.
“You don’t look sick.” The words escape before I can stop myself.
He laughs. A brittle sound. “I even say that to myself. To my mirror self. It’s foolish, right? Perfect health.”
“And yet . . .”
“Exactly. I’m assured it won’t last.”
“The appearance of health?”
“Right. I’m told from here it will get ugly.”
“When?” I ask, but I don’t think I really want to know.
“Weeks. Possibly months. Certainly no longer.”
“And so you ordered a hit.” My voice is quiet. Still. I can feel tears standing in my eyes, but I will myself not to cry.
He looks at me sharply. Is he surprised? Or not surprised at all? I can’t tell.
“That’s right. It seemed the most humane thing for all concerned.”
“Under the circumstances.”
“Yes.”
“What were the specifications?” I ask, though I think I know the answer. “How did you imagine it would be?”
“Well, obviously, I want it to be fast. Other than that, I’d rather not know.”
“That makes sense.”
The waiter arrives with our entrees. We sip some more at the wine and push the food around on our plates.
“I really am very sorry to learn all of this.” I hesitate. Add, “I can’t even tell you how sorry I am.”
“Thanks. And I guess I know.”
“I guess you do.” I hesitate again. And then, “So . . . now?”
“I don’t want to know. Don’t want to see it coming.”
“But now is too soon,” I protest, keeping my voice calm. And my heart.
“I don’t want to be one of those who goes out flailing.” He says this calmly. Matter-of-fact. “I can’t be.”
“But you’re so far from that. Look at you! It could be years.”
He shakes his head. “Not years, no. Do you think I would do this lightly? I’ve given it a lot of thought. All of the angles, keeping in mind my kids, my insurance, the business, everything. This is the best time.”
And suddenly I understand. “Things go better if you don’t die of the disease.”
“Yes.”
We put it away for the time being. We have our dinner. It is delicious in addition to being pretentious. Afterward we walk hand-in-hand down Robson Street, stopping to watch street performers. He asks if I want my fortune told by an old woman who is reading tarot cards at a table she has set up outside Muji. I decline. I understand that there is nothing in the future that I need or want to know.
That night we make love with a new ferocity. We are clinging to something that can’t be held, that’s how it feels.
I wake to strong sunlight and the call of seagulls. I get up before he does and pull the pieces of myself together. Then I pack my things. It doesn’t take long.
He wakes as I head for the door.
“Will I see you again?” he calls, his voice sounding suddenly weaker. Not from illness, I’m sure of that. But from something that wrenches my heart.
I don’t answer, as I leave his key on the sideboard next to the sculpture in the hall. What is there really to say?
I go to the airport. Get a rental. I only need it for a few hours. I park it safely, my stuff neatly in the trunk. I head out on foot to find what I need. It doesn’t take long. The car is long and old and perfect for my needs. It is solid, like a tree, and the ignition is broken easily.
From the time I sight the car to when I start it with a screwdriver is under five minutes and then I’m gliding around in a full-sized piece of Detroit steel that was old enough to vote before I was.
I don’t wait long outside his office. I know I’ve timed things well. We haven’t known each other long, but I have a handle on his routine and so I idle the big car down the block. Lying in wait.
When he emerges from the building, I try not to analyze the firmness of his step or the jut of his chin, the tilt of his head. I try not to think about how he is feeling. Is this a good day for him or bad? Is he in pain? Has he said all his goodbyes?
I follow him for three blocks before I see the right moment to approach. I wonder if he feels the shadow or the ghost of me, but I discard the thought. It is fanciful, and I have no place for that here.
I begin to accelerate as his feet leave the curb. I admire again the spring in his step, the length of his stride.
He is in the middle of the intersection as I reach him. It happens very fast.
Saturna Island
by Timothy Taylor
Kitsilano
1
Friendship. You know it’s real when it ends in blood.
Harris wasn’t sure who said that. Maybe nobody. But as he typed the sentence—fingers to the keys of his computer, hands shaking—it had the ring of truth.
Fifteen years gone. They were stupid kids not to see it back then. Harris typed that too: Saturna Island, that whole bohemian summer. We were stupid kids.
Drinking and arguing and fucking. Harris remembered rocky beaches, dense forests, steep cliffs, a TV tower, and an auto graveyard in the deepest part of the forest where they took morning hikes. He remembered the ferry from Vancouver every Friday afternoon they could get away, cutting the steel-blue waves. Their shared ritual, seeking freedom from jobs they hated. But didn’t all such cleansing rituals conceal a sacred violence in the end?
Harris typed: Sacred violence. He thought of Roen who ran the B&B on Boot Cove where they’d all stayed. Sitting at that big dining room table while the Szekszárdi and the weed went around. Arguing about film and music and their dreams for the future. Murch was going to quit lawyering, go work at Habitat for Humanity. Purma wanted to counsel teens. Harris was still a banker then, not yet having quit to become a writer—three published crime novels featuring a detective named Harvey Raven, a recently cratered marriage, broke and alone in a Kitsilano basement surrounded by empty pizza boxes and spent Tetra Paks of French Rabbit pinot noir, remembering.
Time to end this, Harris thought. Typing now: Time to end this.
Roen had been the leader: thin, handsome, Roman nose, dark hair flowing to his shoulder blades. A musician, he said, though plucking tunes for his girlfriend Calliope was the only performance anyone ever saw. The B&B was owned by a man named Jimmy. Biker, Roen said. Member of the Exiles.
Bullshit, Harris thought at the time, given
the fact that things Roen said often were. But then it all turned out to be crucially true. Some boring Tuesday at the bank. Roen calls. He’s in town hanging at the Railway Club waiting to meet the man. Wouldn’t Harris like to join them? And Harris said yes, hating himself for his seeming vulnerability to whatever Roen might suggest.
No subtle clues required. Jimmy arrived wearing Exile colors complete with a One Percenter patch. And in the awkward fifteen minutes of small talk—before Jimmy downed two fingers of Maker’s neat and made his departure—Harris was mostly successful in not staring at the tattooed tear leaking from the corner of Jimmy’s right eye.
Roen of course had to spill everything soon as the guy was out the door. Jimmy popped down from Whistler every couple of weeks with a delivery, Roen said. Cash. Like twenty-five, thirty grand, dropped off in a briefcase similar to the one Roen then produced from under the table.
“Fuck sake,” Harris said. “Don’t show me that!”
But Roen knew he was curious. So here came all the details. The shrink-wrapping involved, the secret storage compartment in the old studio building at the bottom of the B&B orchard, the old key he then flourished on a key fob shaped like a guitar.
“All access, motherfuckers,” Roen said, tossing the keys onto the bar while Harris recoiled. “What? This is material. I thought you wanted to be a writer.”
Fucking Roen and Murch and their snickering about his pathetic ambitions. Roen the wannabe musician/crook. Murchma-fucking-Ghandi.
Harris at the table in his tiny kitchen, hands quivering over the keyboard. Of course he’d still been on the ferry that Friday, the whole gang as usual. Choppy seas on the voyage out, something changed in the air that he was not detecting. Purma and her friend Zach. Shanny, with whom Murch devoutly wanted to sleep. Her friend Jin, who Harris could still close his eyes and see, black hair shining in the dusty rays of sunshine coming in through a cracked window. How many crossings had been made by then? How many ritual cleansings to prepare them for that final night? On the ferry. Over dinner and all that wine and arguing and job talk that climaxed with an inebriated Shanny climbing onto a chair to announce that she could never be involved with a lawyer.
Harris took no pleasure remembering Murch’s humiliation. Something had been launched in that moment. Something Harris saw now in the dark clouds rolling to the top of the inlet. Gray rain approaching. Shanny poised in memory, working it through. You couldn’t trust lawyers, she’d finally announced, because lawyers were paid to lie. And thus was the entire law itself a lie.
Silence in the room. Pity for Murch who was red-faced and seething. Except Roen, who only twisted the blade: “Isn’t that true, me droogie? A lawyer will rep a drug dealer that he knows is guilty. He’ll rep a drug dealer who’s stashed away money somewhere, his proceeds from crime, money that will later be used to pay the lawyer’s own bills. Isn’t that what Shanny is saying, what makes the entire law itself a lie?”
The evening unspooled. Shanny and Murch continued to argue. Calliope cried for no real reason. Roen disappeared upstairs only for Harris to numbly register that Jin had gone up the same stairs only moments prior.
Purma joined him on the deck, smoking Pall Malls and smirking. Harris realized he was host to murderous, omnidirectional thoughts. The futility of everything. The smell of blood.
Black rain on the window in Kitsilano, the storm unfurling. Harris hearing Purma as if she were in the room, speaking her precise and killing words. Jin was gay, anyway. They’d kissed earlier, no big thing. One other thing too. “You mind I say one other thing, Harris?”
Like he could stop her. Square face, dark-skinned. Punjabi, he remembered, daughter of a big-time area trucker. Purma didn’t think he was destined to be a writer, she went on to say. And he remembered her words on the topic as if they were typed on the page in front of him, which he realized then that they were, his own type, letter by painful letter. You’re a banker dude and good at it. Ford Windstar, wife, kids, and dogs. Harris, cheer up. I predict you end up with a minivan and lots of money.
Harris in agony then, and now. Harris with tears streaking his cheeks. The phone ringing. Four in the afternoon, rain hammering down. Harris had just cracked his second beer of the day that would end once again down in Chianti’s bar over wine and more wine. He caught his face in reflection in the darkened window. The bandage applied late last night was leaching blood.
What had the man said on the beach where Harris had been drunkenly wandering? Harris couldn’t remember. Only what the man did. Three quick applications of what felt like a concrete fist.
Harris, broke and alone with a busted face. Fifteen years it had taken for the blood to flow, and it was flowing now.
His phone ringing and ringing. Harris typed the words before picking up. He just knew.
Fifteen years later, Murch calls.
2
Murch started in like no time had passed at all: “Writer dude.World’s most coveted jobs, droogie. Up there with porn star.”
Harris was holding a fresh beer to his face in his crappy apartment in Kits. The rain had stopped. No rainbows. Just the threat of more rain. “Murch,” he croaked, “how goes building houses for poor people?”
Murch laughed and shifted his weight in what Harris imagined was an expensive leather chair. He was visualizing Murch’s thirtieth-floor harbor views, mountains opposite, sailboats tracing lines in the water. Murch had quit lawyering and gone into real estate, where any idiot could score.
“Follow the money,” Harris said.
“Or be poor,” Murch said.
“The law taught you that.”
“It did indeed, me droogs.”
“But the law is a lie, Murch. Don’t you remember that?”
Big laughs. Harris hated himself for being pleased.
“My God, Shanny,” Murch said, “she sure had a rack. Saw her in Home Depot a couple years back. About the size of an eight-person tent. But listen.”
So here it came, as quick as that. And the rain surged harder than before, charging up the slope of Larch Street toward him. Harris with his eyes closed, seeing that strewn dining table and empty room. It was about Roen. Harris knew it.
“Shit news, man,” Murch said. “Roen’s dead.”
Harris leaned forward, elbows on his knees. Suicide. A week, maybe ten days prior.
“Jesus,” Harris said, hand in his hair, scalp sweating.
Bullet to the head, Murch informed. “All fucked up at the end too. Living in the Downtown Eastside, drugs and scumbag friends. You know about this, me droogs?”
“No,” Harris said. “Hadn’t heard from him since way back.”
So Murch filled him in. Seemed Roen had actually made an album that got some play. Then got ripped off by a manager, taken for everything. Tax bills. Rent arrears. Bankruptcy. Welfare. Escalating addiction problems. “A decade later he’s broke like you never get unbroke.”
“Fucking fuck,” Harris said. “Meth?”
“Purma said dope,” Murch replied. “I thought that was heroin but what the fuck do I know?”
So Purma was in the picture. Purma, who Harris would’ve been happy never to see again. “So they were in touch? Purma, Roen?”
She’d gone into addiction counseling and Roen had walked in her door. “Three months ago,” Murch said. “He was at quit or die. So she helps him out. Six weeks clean. Then something happens.”
Hard relapse. Worst thing for an addict, apparently. He disappeared and Purma finally had the cops bust down his door. “Grim scene,” Murch continued. “The body liquefies after a week. Who knew? Here’s the thing, though.”
Not this, Harris thought. No fucking funeral for a friend. But it wasn’t that. Ten times worse. There was a will. Purma had it and wanted them to take a look.
Harris’s right ear was ringing. Amber pus was oozing from his cheek and came away on his fingers, sticky and odorous. The man had said something before punching, from the shadows of a black hood.
“You
okay?” Murch asked.
“All good,” Harris said. “All good.”
Thinking hard here, calculating, weighing what new things the moment now made necessary.
“This one time,” Harris said. “Totally forgot, me droogie. I saw him, I mean. I saw Roen.”
3
Murch’s office. Priceless art and beautiful real estate people rushing around. Murch in gleaming black wingtips, blue striped shirt, dark suit. Grinning, of course. Big hand outstretched. “Writer dude. Warning: I’m a star fucker.”
“Let me just come clean,” Harris said. “It was me. I killed Roen for fucking Jin that one time.”
“You did too, didn’t you? You psychopath. You fucking simmered for fifteen years then wasted him.”
“Ask,” Harris said, fingering the bandage. “But it’s a boring story. I got jumped.”
“Course you did,” Murch said. “Purma’s in my office. Drink? Perrier? Latte? You want booze but it’s the twenty-first century, for fuck’s sake, not Mad Men.”
Thirtieth-floor views, boats in the harbor. Check, check. And with the whisper of a glass door breathing shut, they were together again. Purma, with the soil-y smell of patchouli about her. A courier bag over one shoulder and an envelope in her other hand. So Roen joined the reunion in his own way. No mistaking why old friends were gathered. Do not bend, fold, or multilate.
Purma took Harris’s hand in her iron grip. “Harris,” she said, “I stand corrected.”
“Meaning he got more beaten up last night than expected?” Murch said. “Careful, he’s dripping.”
“A few days ago,” Harris said. “It’s healing.”
“I meant you becoming a writer. Harvey Raven. Serious props, man.” Purma still had not released his hand.
“You seriously read one?” Murch asked. “I had to google that shit. Amazon ranking five million something. Right on.”
“Ignore him,” Purma said. “I read all three. Sorry for what I said on the island. That was me being jealous.”
