Peter Watts Is an Angry Sentient Tumor

by Peter Watts

  It was not a Christmas card. It was not a birthday card. It was an invitation to a cocktail party: at least, it was festooned with cartoon pink elephants and martini glasses beneath the cheery inscription

  HOPE YOU CAN MAKE IT!

  Immediately beneath this, Grandma had added in ball-point pen:

  To Christmas and your birthday!

  I opened the card and read the note within:

  Dear Peter,

  Somebody gave me this billfold, but I already have a billfold so I thought you might like it for Christmas and your birthday. Happy birthday!

  Love, Grandma

  P.S. Please tell your father that Uncle Ernie has died.

  I had already learned a great deal about Christmas during the preceding twelve years. What Avis taught me was a valuable lesson about family, and it was this: they suck.

  It was a lesson that has stood the test of time across all the decades between then and now. Many have been the relationships I’ve co-piloted from blast-off to burn-out; many the collateral families thrust upon me like disapproving and destabilizing ballast mid-flight, my coerced attendance at their interminable Christmas and Thanksgiving get-togethers only serving to reinforce my conviction to never have one of my own (and, doubtless, their own conviction that their daughter could do so much better). The lesson I learned at my grandmother’s knee has always stood me in good stead.

  Until now.

  Now, oddly, I have encountered a family that actually, well, doesn’t exactly suck. In fact, it doesn’t suck at all. It took a while to figure that out. They had to patiently lure me close in small stages, as though bribing a feral and skittish cat with small helpings of tuna. Suddenly I was curled up at the hearth and there wasn’t a fundamentalist Catholic or a Burlington banker or a weaponized 9-iron anywhere in sight. So, reluctantly, it is time to put my grandmother’s lesson away, to set it free, to bequeath it to others who might still find it useful.

  I bequeath it to you. Treat it well. Heed its wisdom; it is right so much more often than wrong. In fact, it may be truer now than ever, since I might just have snatched up the last available kick-ass family on the planet.

  Most families suck. Especially this time of year. It is okay to admit that; it is okay to tell them to their faces. Have a couple of drinks first: that’ll make it easier.

  Merry Christmas.

  We Need to Talk About Kevin.

  Blog Oct 16 2017

  Oh fuck, I think. I’m gonna get arrested again.

  There’s a growing cluster of uniforms in the ravine abutting our property: city employees, police, a couple of guys wearing unfamiliar insignia. Two cops poke at the tent in the ravine just across our fence. Their cars are pulled up in front of the house: those ones with the new, aggressive gray-and-black styling because the old blue-and-whites didn’t look enough like the Batmobile.

  It was only a matter of time. Kevin spent most of last night screaming death threats to the trees again. Someone must have complained.

  I switch on my phone’s voice recorder, slip it into my back pocket, trudge grimly into the underbrush. I pass the two whose insignia I didn’t recognize from the window: Salvation Army, as it turns out (“Gateway: The Hand of God in the Heart of the City”). They look concerned and ready to help. I wonder if they know that Kevin’s gay; the Sally Ann’s a notoriously homophobic organization.

  “So what’s going on?” I ask in passing. One of them shrugs, jerks a thumb towards the center of action.

  The cops have ripped away the fly and are talking to the huddled figure rocking in the exposed shell of the tent. They look up as I approach.

  “Hi. That’s my tent.” Maybe not the optimal ice-breaking line, but better than back away from the homeless guy and no one gets hurt.

  They look at me.

  “I gave it to him to keep him from getting rained on.” There was a torrential rainstorm a few months back, punched a hole in our roof and soaked through to the living room ceiling. I came home that afternoon to find Kevin taking shelter on our porch. He apologized for the intrusion. It was the first time we spoke, although he’d been living rough in the ravine for a couple of months at least. “He’s harmless, really. He yells a lot, but when he’s leveled out he’s actually kind of charming.”

  One of the cops is about as tall as me, and broader. The other is short enough to be susceptible to Napoleon Complex. He’s the one who first tells me to back up, who says I’m interfering with their job.

  “Kevin?” I say. “You okay, dude?” The figure in the tent keeps rocking.

  They tell me, once again, to back off. “The problem,” I say, “is that you guys have a really bad reputation when it comes to dealing with black guys1 with mental issues (see: Sammy Yatim). I’m worried about what you might do to him.” At some point during this exchange I’ve pulled my phone from my pocket and switched to video record.

  “Look, you want your tent back, we’ll give you your tent back.”

  “It’s not about the tent, he’s welcome to the tent—”

  “You want to record this, go ahead and record. But you are interfering with our job. So back away.”

  Which, despite my gut instincts, I have to admit is reasonable. I take a few steps back.

  “Further,” says the littler guy.

  Another step.

  “Further.”

  I figure I’m far enough; certainly well out of Interfering Range. “I don’t think that’s gonna happen,” I say, “I’ll stay right here.”

  He doesn’t push it.

  And I have to admit, they seem to be trying their best at a tough job. Nobody’s tasered or shot Kevin (or me) yet. They’re not escalating in the way that ends with unarmed people shot in the back, or choked to death for selling loosies. They’re actually trying to talk to the dude.

  One of the Gateway guys has dealt with Kevin before. They bring him over to try and talk Kevin out of the tent. I end up chatting with the City people; against the law to camp on public property, they point out. They gave Kevin a week’s warning that they’d be coming. Came by just yesterday to remind him, left a note when he wasn’t there. And there are shelters. Gateway’s got a bed for him.

  But Toronto shelters don’t allow pets, and Kevin has a cat: a skittish, overweight black-and-white shorthair named “Blueberry Panda”. They used to live together in an apartment run by the Toronto Community Housing Corporation. Kevin had arranged with the government to have his rent deducted automatically from his disability income. He went for months thinking that his rent was being paid; he believed that right up until the day TCHC evicted him last spring. Apparently they’d refused to authorize the direct-deposit arrangement after being unable to contact him by phone for “verbal confirmation.”2

  I explain this to the City people; they’re sympathetic but whatyagonnado. “Just hypothetically,” I wonder, “what if Kevin moves into our back yard?”

  They look at me as though I’m the one rocking back and forth in the tent. “Well he wouldn’t be on public land, but there’d still be the disturbing the peace issue.” And they’re right, of course. The current situation is unsustainable. A few nights back I found myself standing out in the rain at 2 a.m., peering through the fence to see if the fire Kevin had lit was in danger of burning down our shed or setting the ravine alight. It wasn’t; but obviously the guy needs help. I just don’t know if the current system can give him any. In terms of mental health this place has gone to shit ever since the government decided to cut costs by classifying everyone as an outpatient. It’s a lesser-evil sort of thing.

  Gateway guy has made no progress; Big Cop (Officer Baird, I learn later) approaches me and says, “I think we got off on the wrong foot. You don’t know me, you’re judging me by the uniform. I’m honestly trying to help this guy; you say you have a relationship with him? Maybe you could try talking to him?”

  “Well, sure,” I say, suddenly feeling like kind of a dick.

  We go back to Kevin’s tent—my tent, until I g
ave it to him on the condition that he stop screaming death threats in the middle of the night (or at least that he make it really clear that those death threats were not aimed at us). I remember he smiled when I said that, looked kind of rueful. Now that I think back, though, I realize he made no promises.

  He’s originally from Trinidad. Speaks with this wondrous liquid accent. Back in the nineties he earned a degree from the University of Toronto: dual major in chemistry and philosophy. How cool is that?

  Now he huddles half-naked in the woods, and rages against monsters at three in the morning.

  “Kevin? Dude? Remember me?”

  The tent stinks. There’s a tear down one side where the local raccoons tried to get at Blueberry’s kibble. A small mountain of Bic lighters spills across a dirty scavenged mattress. A drift of empty plastic bottles. Half-eaten meals gone bad in foil wrappings. A couple of empty prescription vials (big surprise there). Kevin’s knapsack: the thin edge of a grimy Macbook peeking out from a nest of balled-up socks and underwear.

  He sits in the middle of it all, half-clothed: a dirty sleeping bag wrapped around his shoulders, a forgotten cigarette burning down between his fingers. He looks a little like a performance artist channeling that mud-and-garbage Devil’s Tower Richard Dreyfuss sculpted in his living room, back in Close Encounters.

  After our first sodden introduction, Kevin would wave a cheery “Hello neighbors!” at the BUG and me during his comings and goings. Occasionally he bummed a twenty to pay for a shower and a roof at the local bath-house; once he woke us late on a Saturday morning to ask if he could use our bathroom. Every now and then he’d push it a bit—asked if he could keep my hammer with him in the ravine, asked our house-sitters for the household WiFi password while we were out of town—but he also took No for an answer. We were a bit worried, at first, about getting sucked into a camel-nose scenario, but the dude always respected boundaries. Always cheerful and charming, in the light of day at least.

  A centimeter of ash drops off the cig and smolders on the mattress. I try to tap it out. Kevin flinches away and doesn’t look at me.

  I ask how he’s doing, try to invoke past shared experience to bring him out of it: “Remember when we set this tent up? Fucking insects nearly ate me alive.”

  “Insects don’t exist in Alzheimer Space,” he snaps.

  It’s a start. It’s more than he’s said to anyone else. I slide a bit of aluminum foil towards him across the fabric: “Just to keep the ash from, you know, setting the mattress on fire.”

  “Ash does not exist in Alzheimer Space. Mattress does not exist in Alzheimer Space.”

  “Dude? What are you—”

  “You do not exist. You do not exist in Alzheimer—”

  Finally it clicks: All time and space.

  “You do not exist in all time and space. Nothing exists in all time and space.”

  In principle it’s a decent coping mechanism. On some level he must know that the voices he hears at night, the things he rails against when the rest of us are trying to sleep, don’t actually exist. So he’s rejecting false input, only he’s—overgeneralizing. He’s rejecting everything as unreal.

  I am false data. Why would he believe anything I say?

  I try a bit longer, take some small satisfaction that at least I’ve got him talking, even if only to deny reality. Finally I crawl out of the tent, turn to Baird & Bud: “He’s gone totally solipsistic.”

  “What’s sol—solistic?”

  “He’s not recognizing anything beyond himself as real. I think he thinks we’re all hallucinations or something, like he’s some kind of Boltzmann brain.”

  By now the paramedics have arrived. Officer Baird and I stand back and watch one of them squat down, ask Kevin to come out. “Just want to test your blood pressure, buddy”—which, if not a bald-faced lie, is so very far from the whole truth that it might as well be. And yet, what else is there to do? Kevin couldn’t even pass a Turing test in his current condition.

  “You know, the press paints us in a really bad light,” Officer Baird remarks. “There are a few assholes, but most of us are good people. I’m a good person.”

  I actually believe him. That last part, anyway.

  “I get that,” I say. “The trouble is, you good people cover for the assholes. You have to, because you need to count on them when you’re in a tight spot. I understand the dynamic, but you gotta admit that suspicion is a reasonable mindset to take into these things.”

  “I’ve had training in this sort of thing. I go for de-escalation.” (I immediately flash back to a couple of other incidents in my past where LEOs, fully free to escalate, stepped back and chose to engage instead. And others where they, well, didn’t. Funny how the latter interactions tend to loom so much larger in memory.) “I always try to resolve things peacefully,” Baird continues.

  “And ninety-five percent of snakes are harmless”—invoking my most-favorite ever biology-cop analogy—“but you still carry an antivenom kit when you go into the desert.”

  He shrugs and, I think, concedes the point.

  Kevin’s been contained. The paramedics wheel him past on a stretcher. He’s buckled down and strapped in. His hands are cuffed behind his back. He looks around, lost. “Could you take the cuffs off, please?” he asks. “I’m not a violent person.”

  Three minutes, tops, since nothing existed in all time or space. Just moments ago he was stuck in a loop that denied the very existence of external reality. Now he’s perfectly coherent. He doesn’t understand why he’s being treated this way.

  They don’t take off the cuffs. I don’t blame them. It breaks my heart anyway. I tell Kevin I’ll take care of Blueberry while he’s away (the little pudgeball fled into our backyard while all this was going down). Officer Baird and I wander after the gurney; he gives me his badge and phone number, and his email in case I want to follow up (“I probably won’t be able to give you any details—that’s Kevin’s confidence—but I can at least tell you he’s okay.”) I wonder if he’s the kind of guy who’d be willing to answer a few background questions if I ever put a cop in one of my stories.

  The city employees move in with garbage bags and blue latex gloves. They say I can have my tent back if I want but it’s a write-off; I salvage the hollow bones (gotta be able to find a use for those somewhere) and let them collect everything else for disposal.

  The ambulance drives away.

  There are two people in Kevin’s brain. They don’t play well together; only one is in control at any given time. Some kind of switch toggles between them. I hope Kevin can find a way to keep his hand on it.

  In the meantime, a black shape lurks in the underbrush and glares at me with yellow eyes. She’s lost her best and only friend; Kevin may have his issues but those two have been together for almost ten years, and he chose to sleep without a roof over his head rather than abandon her. So we won’t abandon her either. She still doesn’t trust us as far as she could throw an ibex, but she creeps out of cover to eat the food we serve, once we’ve gone back inside.

  I guess it’s a start.

  1 https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2017/07/21/siu-charges-civilian-in-beating-of-teen.html

  2 This is typical of the TCHC; they treat their tenants with contempt and every request as a shiftless attempt to game the system. I lived there for years, fighting rearguard against bedbugs and bad electrical wiring. When I asked them to deal with the black mold in my bathroom or the meter-wide hole in my ceiling, they literally laughed in my face.

  And So It Begins.

  Blog Jun 23, Jul 3 2010

  They could have held the whole damn G20 summit in Huntsville, like the G8 immediately before it; the infrastructure was already in place. But they didn’t. They decided to stick it in the heart of downtown Toronto, and then build an indoor wading pool with fake plastic trees and wall-sized pictures of the Muskokas so visiting dignitaries and journalists could get a feel for Canada’s Great Outdoors.

  Or, if they had to do
in Toronto, they could have used the brand new facilities at Exhibition place. Right on the lake, state of the art, much easier for security. Designed explicitly for just this kind of thing. But no: too unobtrusive.

  Instead, they’ve walled off a huge section of the downtown. Nobody gets in or out without ID and security screening. Trains and streetcar routes have been chopped in half like worms. UK-level camera networks have been installed throughout the core, and the fuckers aren’t even pretending that those will be coming down when the festivities are over; we’ve jumped into a whole new surveillance-state bracket over the course of a single extended photo-op. Half the city (including the Ministry of the Attorney General) has been told to just stay home for the rest of the week. Bay Street execs have been warned not to wear suits and ties to work: such attire constitutes “posing as a dignitary”, you see, makes you suspicious by virtue of the fact that you’re dressing to blend in with all those world-class entourages deep in the Forbidden Zone. (Of course, if you don’t wear a suit and tie in the heart of TO’s business section you look like a protester, and I don’t have to tell you what’s in store for those poor bastards.)

  Local journos have been outfitted with gas masks and body armour by their employers. None of them expect to be shot or gassed by protestors; the Fourth Estate is protecting its own against the gentle protections of local law enforcement, who have been out in force for some time now. The core is infested, the police are literally moving in packs; we encountered two separate gangs of them just walking home the few blocks from dinner last night. Tourists caught taking snapshots of the Great Wall are forced to delete their files or be arrested. The sound of helicopters outside my building has been incessant and deafening; I barely noticed the earthquake this afternoon.