by Shilo Jones
Then I’m on YouTube, clicking links the algorithm recommends, watching the first few seconds of whatever video pops up with the sound turned off: a man leaping into a swimming pool under stormy skies; GoPro footage of a motorcyclist careening off an overpass; a toddler dancing in front of a television; a woman illustrating the proper way to carve a pineapple; a sunglass-wearing Labradoodle on a stand-up paddleboard; a flood somewhere tropical carrying mud huts into a massive sinkhole; a girl hanging upside down by her ankles and covered head to toe in whip cream; a jihadi waving a sword; something huge and unnamed skimming beneath a fishing boat in the Atlantic; a calico kitten about to leap from a fridge; a survivalist giving a firing-range tutorial on the AR-15, a morbidly obese man lifting a lemon meringue pie to his mouth; a time-lapse of flooded coastlines; a skinny kid dressed in black, eyes ringed in purple eyeliner, trying to consume an old woman alive on a brightly lit subway and the woman fighting back, clawing at him, and as the images scour my mind I hear a woman in a mansion screaming you are a soldier and yet you are afraid and the idea springs forward, how remarkable that a life can pivot on a single flash of coherence, and then it’s back to the image of Mr. Craig Williams, hale and grinning, so super alive—
Jasminder Bansal
The smell of cigarette smoke and powdered carpet cleaner lingers in my apartment building. Up the steps, a chipped plastic handrail painted bronze, scratched and beat-up walls, a lapdog’s half-crazed barking, an old man’s throaty cough. I imagine tenants moving in and out over the sixty years the building’s been around. Was it once considered respectable, a decent place to live? Before the boiler went in the middle of winter and it took the landlord three frigid weeks to fix? Before the infestations? Mice. Mites. Fleas. Bedbugs. Before the dope pads arrived with tenants running extension cords to hall outlets because their power had been disconnected? Before landlords started charging monthly fees for access to the laundry room, storage lockers, parking stalls?
My mother and I live together in a one-bedroom apartment, but I rarely see her. I try to spend as little time here as possible. Simply entering the building leaves me feeling exhausted and ashamed. Should we be going grocery shopping together, getting on each other’s nerves but sticking together like families are supposed to, being stronger at the end of the struggle?
My failures have made me a better entrepreneur.
Tonight my mother, Pardeep Bansal, is working in the hall closet she’s converted into her office. Lit by two screens on a desk inside the recessed darkness. My mother came out swinging in her early work. Stark, uncompromising photographs and videos that felt like a smack in the face and an embrace all at once. Now she spends eighteen hours a day fiddling with code-generated colour gradients and pre-made filters in her editing software, snipping a half-second from one clip and adding it to another, reversing them, splicing isolated moments of newsreel footage of Amar’s death to weather reports from around the world, drawn to the catastrophic and unpredictable, lost in minutiae and a sense of futility but still trying to discover or create a space for her grief that doesn’t come prepackaged.
She doesn’t move as I enter, doesn’t acknowledge me.
The lights are out. She’s seated on the same office chair Meeta caught her fingers in a decade ago, crushed to bleeding. The television in the closet is tuned to the weather channel, the volume off. A satellite image of swirling clouds massing over the Pacific. Another weather system rolling in. A blond woman gestures with a laser pointer, makes ominous expressions at the cloud graphics. The second screen is frozen on an image of Amar stepping out of his Escalade, but my mother has shifted the focus beyond Amar’s shoulder to the crowd of gangsters and wannabes surrounding him. She’s motionless except for her fingers tracing the touchpad, the occasional key click on a computer on long-term loan from a friend at an artist-run centre. I’m preoccupied with worrying about the open house for Marigold tomorrow and am about to walk behind her and into the kitchen, see if there’s any food, try and get my beauty sleep when she says, “Something happen today?”
Still staring at her project.
“No. Why?”
“Something about how you came in. See this? Clouds from this storm in Manila appear to magnify the reflection here? In the window behind the police officer? Behind Amar? This might turn out to be an all right day, if I can just…”
I have a memory of my mother as a beautiful, independent woman in a spectacular crimson sari, even though I never saw her wearing one. An artist and performer. A woman of conviction and passion who chose to leave her country and move to Canada on her own to pursue her art. She once asked her kids to be her accomplices in the kidnapping of an unhappy-looking capybara at the Langley petting zoo. She let us wear our school clothes inside out and backwards and laughed when other kids tried to correct us. Her favourite purse was from Japan, shaped like a pink octopus. She painted tiny fairy doors on alley walls and told us they were real and we left snacks for our fairy neighbours like we did for Santa Claus. Her favourite expression—to all three of us kids, each stressed out and uptight in our own way—was take it down a notch. After my mother left India her parents never spoke to her again, and despite her worldliness she wasn’t prepared for the ease with which my local-boy photographer father would cut his losses once he started feeling weighed down by the oppressive bourgeois institution of family.
I’m standing directly behind her, staring at my brother’s image. “Mom, I can’t do this now. I have an open house in less than six hours. I need—”
“So now the realty makes you work on Satur—”
“They don’t make—”
“But if you don’t do it you—”
“I won’t get the job. No.”
“Well, great for them. For hiring someone as aspiring and diligent as you.”
I try and let it slide. Take it down a notch? But instead I retaliate, snark that the electric bill came in, that we’re already late—
A few quick finger swipes and she hits play on the project timeline. Scattered images roll across the screen, but as I watch there’s this feeling like something’s being revealed. When did I stop believing in my mother and her work? I remember her grant application, a project summary about moving beyond linear narrative time, the thought domain of Eurocentric empiricist culture, and the countless arguments we had about my decision to study journalism, my mother telling me there’s no such thing as truth, just stuff you believe in and stuff you don’t and isn’t that liberating, shouldn’t I embrace that anarchic sensibility instead of wasting my life being used as a fresh face to prop up the old authorities?
My mother’s shoulders tighten at my mention of money. “It’s always worked out for us, hasn’t it? Despite your fretting it’s always—”
“Always? The summer we lived in a gravel pit in Squamish?”
“I wish we could live in a big expensive house, so you’d see how much better and happier life would be. Or not. You have an incredible throwing arm because you spent that summer throwing rocks at pop cans with your brother. And besides, it was a Debordian experiment, an extended dérive. You learned a lot in that camp, even if you aren’t aware of or refuse to admit it.”
My mother turns to face me. She’s fifty-one but looks a decade older. Her skin is loose around her chin and jaw but tight across her brow. When she thinks I’m not looking she blinks rapidly, like she’s having trouble focusing. Her faded house robe hangs half open. I try not to think about what Amar’s death has done to her. She was always the impulsive free spirit. Not telling her bad news comes naturally; I’ve been doing it since forever. I try and remember the last time she saw her doctor. Two months ago? Six? How often do they recommend? Is she taking her medications? I remind myself to check her pillbox. A year ago I found half her meds in the garbage. The doctor said you can’t force her to take them. She makes her own choices. I said yeah but should she?
The weather girl waves her laser pointer at a storm massing west of Vancouver Island. I used
to blame my mother for not letting go of her grief. As if she were holding it in her hand like I’m holding hers now. Not understanding it was grief holding her, not understanding that I wanted her to let Amar go so she could show me how.
“I’ll get the bill paid,” she says.
I didn’t tell her what I saw in the nightclub. How could I? “It’s not a big deal. I’ll do it. Didn’t mean to bring it up.”
She pulls her hand away, digs through a few sketches on her desk. “Shit! Almost forgot. Someone called for you.”
“For me? Here?”
“I took a message. She was nice enough, if a bit snooty. Didn’t leave a name. She asked me to write it down. Word for word. Said she’s happy to have you on board? Must be someone from your realty? She said start with Bo Xi?”
“What?”
“Start with Bo Xi.”
I snatch the notepad. “Bo Xi? Who’s that? It couldn’t have been for me.”
“She used your full name. But she didn’t elaborate.”
I notice how worried she is, feign forgetfulness, tell her thanks while she turns to her screens. I ask if I can put on some music. No answer serves as an okay. I squeeze past her desk. The living room is my bedroom: a single bed with sheets tacked to the ceiling to provide at least the appearance of privacy. My mother, on one of her better days, said the bed looks like a Tracey Emin sculpture. Said private shame can be wielded intentionally, can become strength. Said ugliness can be reclaimed, used as a weapon to undermine a power you disagree with or are hateful of.
The boom box is an old Sony Xplod. Dig through a shoebox looking for a CD, watch my hands shake, drop the box and scatter the CDs across the carpet. Finally manage to put D.O.A. on, once my mother’s favourite band, although she doesn’t listen to music much anymore. I wait for her to tell me to turn it off. She doesn’t, but I keep the volume depressingly low. Who the hell is this Bo Xi? Hear my stomach growl, realize I’m craving a decent meal, fruits and veggies, check the fridge, nothing, wonder if I have enough change for a slice of pizza, find a package of edamame in the back of the freezer, decide that’ll do.
The apartment is hot and stuffy, inspires an awful thought about germs or viruses thriving. I turn down a baseboard heater, crack a window. Our building is on Knight Street, a busy four-lane arterial linking the American border and several Lower Mainland suburbs to Vancouver. We face south toward the bridge. Semis, most headed to the shipyards on the north side of the city, shudder and groan up the hill leading from the river delta onto the rocky higher-elevation land this part of the city is built on. Black exhaust spits from chrome stacks. Particulate settles over everything; in spring I have to wipe the balcony down; the rags look like I used them to clean a barbecue.
Amar and Sim once found an abandoned truck tire in a vacant lot nearby and rolled it down the middle of the street at three in the morning, whooping and cheering as it picked up speed toward the Fraser. I press my forehead to the window, feel the glass tremble. Anonymous phone calls. Sources. Clues. Contacts. You have your whole life ahead of you, one of my Langara professors said after Amar died, when I told him I was dropping out. Was that supposed to make me feel better?
The microwave beeps over Joey Shithead shrieking over a semi-truck gearing down out on Knight Street.
* * *
Approximately twenty-four square feet. That’s what’s mine. The square footage of my bed. Double if I include the space beneath, which is where I store my stuff. And that twenty-four square feet depends on the rent being paid, which depends on my sister, Meeta, which depends on her husband, Will Blevins. Which means my mother and I have nothing. Even in my so-called personal space I know I could easily be sleeping in my car or a shelter, one bit of bad luck or shitty decision away, or maybe it’ll be something completely out of my control (because what’s truly in my control?), a renoviction, property owner flips the building, makes good financial sense, who knows? So in my twenty-four square feet there’s no true rest, just tension and an undercurrent of uncertainty and fear. Worse, there’s also gratitude, the feeling of being lucky to have this…but it’s gratitude complicated by the sense of being held under something or someone and knowing that showing gratitude for my twenty-four square feet is what’s expected of me. Much like how during my meeting with Vincent Peele I constructed a persona to show him I know how lucky I am. Sitting in my bed with my knees curled up, warm, dry, a half-eaten bowl of edamame beside me, feeling the self-hatred that comes from being complicit in my own suppression, and then I’m online and there he is, a man named Bo Xi.
In twenty minutes I learn about several corporations Mr. Xi is involved with: gold mining in South America; infrastructure contracting in Central Africa; luxury property development around the globe. Way down on page fourteen I stumble across a blog post from 2004 written by a disgruntled former employee, a British geotechnical engineer hired to do soil samples for a diamond mine in Angola. The post is a nearly incoherent screed in which the man accuses the company, owned by one of Bo Xi’s subsidiary investment firms, of hiring military contractors to incite rebel violence and using the near civil war as a diversion to bypass regulatory hurdles.
And that’s it. A grudge-fuelled rant. Rumours and unsubstantiated allegations. But I wonder how many Vincent Peeles and Clint Wards this mystery named Bo Xi employs around the globe.
* * *
Awake at sunrise after an anxious sleep with the dream residue of an awful cawing noise in my head. My first thought is a worry about money, which leads straight to the open house later this morning, then to Vincent Peele, Clint Ward, Amar. Look out the window at the bridge over the Fraser River and for a moment the landscape appears in a single scale, cigarette butts as big as warehouses and apartment buildings as small as cigarette butts, equivalent, perspective pressed into a depthless plane, the greasy morning sun the same size as a pebble, or is it the other way around?
Mark Ward
Saturday, six-o-fucking-clock in the a.m., twelve hours after landing in Vancity. Driving one of Clint’s work trucks toward the Cash Corner, early 2000s Ford, not as sick as the Cummins but still dandy, feels good being behind the wheel, eating an overripe apple I bought at 7-Eleven, dark outside, windshield wipers on, work boots on, missing Thailand’s sunshine but not the humidity, should I call Daree? Otherwise feeling flat, wondering what next-level dope comes after the Oxys, which at this point are mostly maintenance. Lots of crap careening through my head, jumbled, mostly excited to get to work, smell fresh-dug dirt, cut lumber, diesel exhaust from the Bobcat.
Left off 2nd onto Ontario, drive down 3rd and the unemployed guys are slouched around the Cash Corner, wearing torn jeans and filthy hoodies or soaked flannel, heads tucked against the cold, stooped, some lucky enough to be sipping coffee, more leaning in doorways and under a stunted fir, seeking shelter, murky figures, ghostly, which is what being poor does: turns you immaterial, a spectre, neither here nor there, able to see the world, the things you want, but not touch them.
I crank the heat in the cab and pull to the curb. In five seconds I got a dozen guys around the truck, a tight semicircle, eyeing me as I eye them, most not saying a word. I spend a minute fucking with the stereo, switching stations, ignoring the men out in the rain to make sure they know what’s up. Ash and burned metal clog my mouth and nose—the scent of fear and anger and hope and hate from labouring men who need money when there’s not enough work to go around. The unholy trinity. There’s some shoving, a flare-up, a few guys fuck off, not wanting to bother. I roll down the window and tell them I got a drainage job over on Alma, maybe a sewer line, lots of digging, hauling gravel, maybe some paving-stone work, and a white kid with a wispy beard and bloodshot eyes under a floppy fake rasta hat says how much and I say nothing for you, hippy, because he’s soft, slumming, down on the corner by choice and not forced circumstance and there are guys here who need the work way more.
“You,” I say, pointing to a kid, big shaved head, big ears, small black eyes, who’s built pr
etty solid. Kid doesn’t bother asking how much, tosses his backpack in the truck box, hovers around the passenger door, waiting, not wanting to sit bitch.
A ripple in the crowd. A tweaker pushes through, scabbed and strung out, sees me, zeros in, pounds on the truck, shouts please Mr. Bossman please until I tell him to get lost. So I guess I’m the bossman now? Point to another guy, older, brown, maybe Latino, and he walks real slow around the front of the truck, taking time to finish his smoke.
“Hey dude I’m right here. Hey! Mark? I’m here like Clint said.”
Hearing my name gets my attention. Kid’s pressed against my door. Short. Was looking right over him. Wavy brown hair, bright-looking, smiling all enthusiastic even in the shit weather at this shit hour. “You Ryan? Fuck you so happy about?”
Ryan lifts a dollar-store toolbox caked in mud. The lid’s been torn off and duct-taped back on, and the thing’s layered with tattered stickers from Mustang and Viper and Malibu Boats and other pricey shit I’m guessing the kid has zero chance of owning. “Working! Fucking right. Hey…Clint calls me Twll.”
“So?” I’m about to tell the kid it’s a stupid nickname, but whatever, his voice pitches all teenaged-excited when he says it, buddy-buddy with the boss. “Twll. Know what it means?”
“Course. Means like dude or bro in…Irish?”
“Sure.”
“Ireland looks rad. Like Trainspotting.” The kid laughs, not some fakey bullshit laugh but genuine-sounding, makes me sad in a way I’m not gonna sit around analyzing. “That scene where the dopehead…remember?”
