DAY 4: Accidental Colours

Those which depend on the state of our eye, and not those which the object really possesses, as when coming into a dark room from the sun. The accidental colour of red is bluish-green, of black, white.

‘Excuse me?’

Framed by lengthening light, the man in the orange hazard vest stared at nothing. I spoke, but he didn’t reply—just stood there as though stillness was mankind’s natural state, as though we were a race of Easter Island figures. He was a Stop Sign Guy: a giant red lollipop tight in his right hand, he was one of a group of city workers attempting to repair a power pole that had been knocked down that morning in the alley behind our apartment. A runaway Brinks truck, since duly sacked and towed, had done the deed.

A shock to see them working. Why fix a power pole when the power is gone? I suppose the answer was too obvious, too bedrock, for me to see, even then. To my credit, however, I was beginning to understand that incredulity was now an outmoded response to unfolding events.

Tanya frowned and waved her hand in front of his glazed eyes. ‘Hey? Anybody in there?’

While the rest of his crew stood huddled beside their crane, talking intensely, Stop Sign Guy’s head tilted slightly back as he stared through the blushing sky toward almost-visible stars above and beyond, his mouth agape. In addition to ‘hanging open’, ‘agape’ also means love, as in the way our mouths go slack when we see Beauty. It’s an ancient Greek word, used in more recent times by Martin Luther King Jr. to describe what he termed ‘disinterested love’—Jesus love, Buddha love. Stop Sign Guy had become a slack-jawed statue. Were statues, I wondered, filled with love? Were they enchanted men and women, jaws hanging slack, who’d been flash-frozen by beauty? Had they seen something that had brought their world to a standstill? Were they beings somehow beyond us, beyond our grasping, snapping little world, transfixed by infinity? Agape, just like me—in my dream?

He was a bony little fellow with nicotine fingers. Young but somehow done with youth. I’ve observed that people whose career trajectories arc toward the holding of stop signs eight hours a day are either really thin or really fat. And they all smoke.

We were about to turn and walk away when, suddenly, Stop Sign Guy was back from wherever he’d been. His mouth closed, he swallowed, and we made eye contact.

He smiled. ‘Sorry. What was that?’

Casual, as though nothing strange was going on. The television had said this would happen: momentary space-outs coupled with a band-of-pressure feeling around the skull right around day four or five. Stop Sign Guy smiled helplessly, the kind of fellow who had questionable taste in music and disturbing taste in movies but who would come over on short notice to help you move something heavy. And be truly grateful for the beer he’d receive as payment.

‘Our car’s parked behind your crane. We were just wondering how long you guys are going to be.’

Tanya and I had come up with a plan: we were going to drive out of the city before things got really ugly, most likely really soon. Some tycoon’s empty mansion up at Whistler would suit us well, we thought. Might as well find somewhere nice for the little woman to lose her mind and for me to stretch out my arms and greet the apocalypse. Or maybe it was simpler than a plan: maybe we were just getting incredibly motivated to take flight.

The night before had been loud, even louder than the preceding day. Looking out our windows we’d been able to see that while the rot hadn’t spread noticeably further on the surface of things, it had dug deeper and plunged its roots into the city’s bloodstream. People running around like spiders, darting in and out of shadows beneath the full moon, intentions unfathomable. Picture an old apple whose skin hasn’t yet collapsed—but beneath that skin the flesh is soft as cheesecake. You sense, smell even, that it’s gone rotten, but you don’t know for sure until you touch it and feel it yield beneath the slightest pressure of your thumb.

We heard the occasional gunshot, but easily adapted to that: if anything, given the hard lessons TV news and cop shows had taught us all our lives, it seemed odd that sporadic gunfire hadn’t been a normal part of life all along.

Stop Sign Guy was gone again. Hard hat off, he was massaging the back of his head, like his memory was knotted up back there. Bundles of nerves roping up from his body into his brain. Yank them, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking, and he’d jerk.

‘Hey! Asshole! What’s your problem?!’

A man in tan overalls, a rage of muscles knotted beneath his superhero-tight T-shirt, had broken off from the group by the crane and was striding toward us. A creature of the gym, he was all swollen limbs and chest. As he neared us, I thought of Blemmyes, headless mythical creatures, their eyes, nose, and mouth lodged in their chests.

‘It’s no biggie, Al.’ Stop Sign Guy was back and speaking up in my defence.

The Blemmye ignored his crew mate and snarled at
me through gritted teeth. ‘I said, ‘What’s your problem?’
asshole.’

There was a question behind his question, and that shadow question was ‘Do you want to dance?’

The Blemmye moved toward me, and I took a step backward: the opening figure in our mambo.

‘I was just asking when you guys were going to be finished. Our car—’

Then I was on the ground, and he was on top of me, swinging drum-taut fists into my sides. The back of my head felt damp and warm; I’d either landed in a puddle of hot soup or I was bleeding. My arms went up to protect my face, but when I realized my ribs were about to be broken I forced them down, lying at attention while he pummelled my biceps and elbows.

And then I found I didn’t much mind.

I felt the pain, or rather saw pain fireworks exploding before my eyes. Physical pain was suddenly just nerve information, a series of tiny electrical charges whose combined voltage wouldn’t be sufficient to power up a small mouse’s iPod. I was curiously detached.

And so instead of screaming for help or begging for mercy, I simply lay there and watched the Blemmye’s face as it swung at me again and again, now panting with exertion. A shrieking demon. Or a wailing baby. Or a professional wrestler, mid-orgasm, perhaps. And what was that streaming in his eyes? Rage? Fear? Shock? Sadness? All of them? Slowly, my field of vision saturated with strange cellophane colours. I saw the faces of Stop Sign Guy and the other crew members behind the Blemmye’s hulking shoulders as he leaned into his work. Their bared teeth were animal signals for their own swampwatering emotions: the same Trick or Treat Mrs Simmons had been offering the night before.

Time took a hike then, the Blemmye’s blows registering like silent exclamation points, until interrupted by a shrill scream that had to be coming from Tanya—a distant, soaring cry horrified to find itself naked in the open air.

‘You’re killing him!’

The beating didn’t last long after that. Violence stale-dates; you can’t just pound away at a man until all that’s left is a red puddle seeping into the ground; you can’t take someone much past hamburger, really, not even if you’re a serial killer or Gitmo interrogator. Soon enough, hands appeared on the Blemmye’s torso and dragged it off me. Three generic cops who’d appeared out of nowhere.

‘You shouldn’t have pushed him,’ the Blemmye howled, straining against an octopus of arms. The creature’s humanity was, as far as I could see, gone. Did it even have a head? I didn’t think so. I’m still not sure.

‘Pushed him? I never—’

‘Ray, he didn’t push me,’ Stop Sign Guy said, eyes flicking back and forth between the creature and me. ‘Why’re you saying that, dude?’

The Blemmye howled and increased its struggles.

‘If you can walk, you better get out of here, man,’ one of the cops told me. He jerked his chin toward Stop Sign Guy. “You too, pal.’

‘Why are you mad at me?’ Stop Sign Guy whined, backing down the alley. ‘What did I do? It’s not fair.’

Listening to Stop Sign Guy’s voice, I felt like getting up and pummelling him myself. Not fair. Words like ‘fair’ or ‘reason’ seemed aligned with antiquated concepts like ‘vapours’ or ‘humours’ or ‘ether’. Similarly, ‘why’ seemed a completely ludicrous path of enquiry. Why are you beating me, sirrah? On Birchin Lane it’s the last question that needs asking; on Birchin Lane it’s a pathetic question, an admission of weakness and defeat. To use the old jailhouse term and not the modern rock and roll one, a punk’s question.

As if to prove my thesis, the Blemmye now turned toward Stop Sign Guy and began to gnash and strain in his departing direction, tendons popping.

Tanya helped me to my feet, and I steadied myself against a Smithrite that reeked of puke and putrefaction.

The cops had their guns out now, one pressed to each side of the Blemmye’s head. It was like something out of a Tarantino remake of the Three Stooges: if they both shot, they’d kill each other as well as my attacker.

‘Shut up, motherfucker! Shut the fuck up!’

‘Paul,’ Tanya whispered, ‘Can you walk?’

I nodded.

‘Stand back, give me a shot at him!’ one cop cried.

The other cop crabwalked backward while his partner stood up and pointed his gun down toward the Blemmye’s heart while speaking softly. ‘You stupid motherfucker. You pathetic fucking piece of shit.’

The Blemmye was writhing like a beetle on its back, arms and legs thrashing as it sought to avoid the gun’s glare.

We staggered down the alley and onto Denman Street. No one followed us. Seconds later we heard a shot and a loud whoop but kept moving.

A lot of broken glass on the sidewalk: trip and you’d cut yourself badly. Yesterday there had been big shards but today the glass had been crunched down into slivers. Tomorrow, perhaps, it would be a crystal powder: Vancouver distilled to its snortable essence.

Our footsteps as we minced along sounded like boots trudging through crusted snow. There were people everywhere, leaning against doorways, sitting on benches and staring, acres of space around them all, all of them looking like leftovers pushed to the back of the fridge.

Two police cars moved slowly down the street as we turned onto Davie, heading east. All the other vehicles, many of them with their windshields smashed and their roofs caved in, were parked or abandoned in the middle of the road.

‘Does it hurt?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Those fucking maniacs.’ She screamed the last word over her shoulder then turned back to me. ‘Listen, we’ve got to get you to St. Paul’s. That’s at least fifteen blocks away. Do you think you can walk that far? I don’t think we’ll be able to—there aren’t any cabs.’

Her voice was pulling me back from wherever I’d been.

‘I’ll try.’

Dusk, the Blindman’s Holiday. Too dark to work by daylight and too soon to light candles. A rheumy-eyed mutt stood in the middle of the sidewalk watching us. He didn’t move, so we stepped around him. Dogs behave differently at night than they do during the day. Not just now: it’s always been that way. At night the ones that have a bone to pick with humankind come growling a little nearer than they would in full sunlight while the frightened, shrinking ones slink a little deeper into the shadows. Now the same thing was happening to the people.

With the deepening of evening, some of the shadowy figures we encountered looked away when I glanced in their direction while others stared back hard, their pupils black and sharp. A week ago I would have thought they were playing tough, but now I saw that it was more than that. They were trying to make us into objects, to force our eyes down and strip away our humanity. Look down and lose or stare back and be prepared for a fight? The old urban conundrum had taken on a sinister new urgency; choices that, until a few days ago, had only to be made in crack alleys or biker bars were now popping up, like toadstools, all around us.

Tanya stopped. Unprepared, I stumbled against her. She turned and searched my eyes.

‘What’s with you, Paul?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What I mean is you’re not showing any emotion. That fucking gym ape back there was going to kill you. You know?’

‘I know.’

‘And you’re not that brave. You should be shaking in your boots.’

She was pushing at buttons, hoping to trigger some outrage, but I didn’t have any to offer her.

‘I know that too.’

‘Well?’

‘The beating didn’t hurt. And it didn’t scare me. I don’t know why.’

She rubbed her temples with the tips of her fingers, then spoke through gritted teeth. ‘It doesn’t make any sense. You’re supposed to be taking care of me! What am I doing babysitting you?’

She was right, of course. And that hurt, even if the beating hadn’t. There were black rings under Tanya’s eyes, and her makeup was poorly applied, resulting in a kind of fuzziness around her face that made it hard for me to look at her. It was time to man up and play the strong, silent part. There was no way I could tell her about the Blemmye now. Thinking of the absurdity of the situation I laughed, as much from a dearth of options as from any other cause.

‘What’s so fucking funny, Paul?’ Tanya pushed me away and stepped back in revulsion. ‘It’s not funny!

I slumped, clenching my stomach muscles to keep myself upright.

‘Nothing. Nothing’s funny. Just like at McDonald’s the other night. Let’s just keep moving.’

Down a side street a group of young men were walking in our direction, hooting, but not, so far as I could see, at us. Not yet. Suddenly I was very much aware of Tanya’s attractiveness—that and the limp that marked me as easy prey.

I started doing my best to feign a normal stride. On the next block, a tall man in a dirty woollen overcoat, hair long and stringy, leaned against the brick wall of a bank next to a darkened ATM, watching us. He could have been a hobo, could have been a poseur; for years it had been getting harder and harder to tell the difference. When we passed him, he began to follow, stopping when we stopped, walking when we walked.

‘What’s your problem?’ Tanya yelled at one point.

He didn’t reply, just stood there, watching us and breathing with his whole body.

After a while we ignored him. Lions and gazelles on the Serengeti. I ask you: what else was there to do?

By the time we were a block from Burrard Street and the hospital, it was dark. We passed through the parking lot of a locked-down Shopper’s Drug Mart, its barred windows and doors a set of gritted teeth. I glanced over at Tanya.

A red dot was bobbing on her forehead.

‘There’s some sort of light shining on your face,’ I whispered. ‘I think it’s a laser sight.’

She wrinkled her brow. ‘What are you…?’

‘Look.’ Grunting, I pulled her to one side and stuck my free hand up in the air to catch the firefly.

For a moment she stared at the red spot wriggling on my palm, still not comprehending. Then, in tandem, we looked up into the forest of blind skyscrapers that surrounded us.

‘Where’s it coming from?’ she whispered.

‘I don’t know.’ I dropped my hand a half a heartbeat before a patch of the asphalt behind us shattered. The red light began to dance crazily on the ground. Another shot. And then another.

Tanya grabbed my hand and dragged me toward the loading dock at the rear of the hospital. A fourth shot, this time right in front of us. Blinded by grit from the flying asphalt we stopped and turned, ants thwarted by a small boy’s hand. We made as if to move toward the drug store, but the red dot shook its head while our feet lurched this way and that inside shoes that seemed glued to the ground.

Then the light was gone, and we heard laughter.

At first I thought it was the invisible gunman, but it wasn’t him—it was the guy in the trench coat who’d been following us. He was standing in the middle of the parking lot, about thirty feet behind us, dancing with the beam of light. The red spot travelled a ticklish path up and down his torso, then across his face. He’d step and the light would move to him. He laughed and nodded at us and didn’t seem so threatening anymore; he looked like he wanted us to be in on the joke.

Then the light fixed on his chest. A fifth shot and he fell, breakdancing in black blood.

We didn’t try to help him. Whatever that says about us, the thought didn’t even enter our heads. Instead, we ran for the shelter of the hospital. Tanya was ahead of me, still holding my hand, and I saw the red dot trace a slash across the back of her T-shirt. But there were no more shots and we made it to the cover of the loading dock. Perhaps the gunman had become entranced by the game he was playing, had been unwilling to reload as that would have meant calling off his red light for a few seconds. That’s what probably saved us. That and our cowardice.

The emergency ward opened onto the hospital’s lobby, which was cordoned off by a grim line of soldiers sporting identical guns and faces, anonymous and grey. There was some lighting—obviously a hospital would have its own generator—but not much. Every third fixture was working. We emerged into the ER like scriptless extras on a film set. An apt simile, because the Emergency Room was a horror movie.

Nothing especially new here, of course. Every time I’ve been in an emergency ward I’ve experienced that horror movie dread, the feeling that something terrible is going to come flailing around the corner at any moment, that every conceivable choice open to you is the wrong one and will lead straight to the gates of Hell.

Why are we even here? I wondered to myself. What on earth did doctors do with broken ribs anyway? You always see bandages wrapped around people’s chests in movies, but what does a tight bandage do except push shattered rib shards deeper into the hot and floppy depths of your innards?

We passed a middle-aged man who reeked of rum. He lay on the linoleum wringing himself like a sodden dishcloth, his checked shirt covered in a slimy, clear vomit that puddled beside his head. He smacked his swollen lower lip again and again, opened his eyes wide, then winced in slow motion.

People sat bleeding against the walls, heads bowed, ashamed to be seen leaking, cupping themselves in various ways, thinking clotting thoughts in the absence of medical attention. In front of us, a lone doctor in filthy green scrubs stood screaming at a pimple-faced teen in an Eminem T-shirt. The kid had the dyed-black hair, ragged shag, and scabby face of someone whose problems predated the current crisis. His forehead was a mass of blue and purple bruises; blood trickled down where the skin had ruptured.

‘You fucking idiot!’ The doctor slapped the boy, who was trying to stagger past him. He blocked the kid’s way and slapped him again, harder. Seeing us, the doctor—a classic A-type—began issuing orders.

‘You!’ He meant me. ‘Hold this piece of shit for me. Every time I leave him alone he goes over to that wall and smashes his head into it.’ I saw a stained, cracked spot on the wall where the glossy white paint had been breached. ‘Then he falls down and lies there for a few minutes and gets up and does it again. He’s already got…You hold him. I’ve got real patients to see to.’

The doctor stalked off, and I slumped into an empty chair. The boy tried to stumble past Tanya, and she let him. He did what the doctor had said he’d do—smashed his head then fell to his knees and moaned.

Tanya came and sat down next to me. ‘What was I going to do? Stand there with my hand up like a school crossing guard until—’

Something stopped her in mid-sentence.

For a moment I thought she was freezing up like Stop Sign Guy had, but that wasn’t it. I followed the line of her gaze and saw the most terrible thing in the entire terrible scene. An Indian woman in a sari sat in a bucket chair, expressionless, a small boy on her lap, turned in toward his mother’s warmth. One of the woman’s arms dangled uselessly at her side, broken or dislocated, while the other was wrapped tight around her son’s shoulders. And the boy? He was angel-asleep.

His eyelids swollen, his lashes long and black, his face unguarded and dreaming. Smiling back at us all from wherever he’d gone. And I knew where he’d gone, knew what dream he was having. I could almost see the golden light shining through his forehead right there in the ER.

While I stared, transfixed, Tanya moved. She strode toward the mother, a warning on her lips.

But it was too late. The others had seen him.

Then all I could think was fairy tales, how the world was a wolf, about to swallow that innocent face whole and force it down into its leathery gullet. Slowly, the crowd moved in on mother and child.

The kid with the smashed-in forehead had looked up from his gumbo-lap and seen the Sleeper boy too. Even as Tanya made her move, he’d already staggered to his feet and begun to point and prattle.

‘That kid’s sleeping! The doctor gave him something to make him sleep!’

Heads turned and everyone in the room began to press around mother and son.

‘What did they give him?’ a pretty redhead in sandals demanded, clenching and unclenching her fists. ‘I want some too! I need some!’

The mother smiled weakly. ‘Nothing. They gave him nothing, ma’am. We are here for my arm only.’

‘Bullshit!’ screamed a man in a pale grey suit, moving toward the pair. ‘Just tell us what the doc gave him. We don’t want to hurt your kid.’

The very fact of the denial revealed it as a lie, and everyone in the room knew it. You could feel the hesitation as a certain line was reached, then crossed.

‘What did the doctor give him? Was it a needle? Check his arm!’

The little boy was awake now. He looked up at his mother’s face. Just before the thicket closed him off from my sight, his head pivoted and he looked straight at me, smiling calmly. Like he was reassuring me even as the mob enveloped him.

Then all I could hear was the mother’s voice. ‘The doctor. I haven’t even seen him yet. Please…!’

The doctor arrived back on the scene and forced his way into the thick of the wriggling mass.

‘This is completely absurd,’ I heard him say, his voice barely audible above the screaming that had now started. ‘Believe me, I never—’

Then all we could see was writhing.

And sounds I don’t care to try to represent or transcribe: what used to be called the cat’s melody. Then the soldiers came rushing in and began firing.

And once more we weren’t heroes.

And then a gap, a hole in this manuscript.