Lytton, B.C. self-immolated. Impatient fires started jumping lakes. My mother-in-law in Vernon was placed on evacuation alert, and as she drove to Vancouver to drop off a car-load of valuable possessions just in case her place burned down, the flames seemed to follow her, nothing but a surging sphere of blood orange sky in the rear-view mirror.
Meanwhile, summer happened as usual. People went to their cabin. The breweries opened their patios and business was brisk. Families ferried freely between all the same islands. Bronzed bodies splashed around in all the lakes and rivers and ocean that the flames hadn’t got to yet. Armageddon? Whatever, buddy! Take a dip, crack a cold one, just paddleboard ‘round the buoy.
I, on the other hand, have been in quite a mood all summer. As the archives of this very newsletter will attest, I spent the entire month of July railing against the hypocrisy of post-secondary professionals and a certain kind of pastor. Not for me smoked oysters on the hibachi! I’ll take a pass on thoughtful chats around a fire with dear friends! Thanks all the same, but pronouncing judgement on those who have wronged me is the only slip ‘n’ slide a man like me will ever need.
Frankly, I intended to spend August involved in much the same way. But on the first of August when everyone else I know and love was away summering, a girl with blue hair started sleeping rough across the street. She wore tight blue jeans, black sandals, a black leather jacket and she tied her hair up in a bun. She looked like she was 17 and weighed not much more than 70 pounds, and on the first night she slept surrounded by a full-sized suitcase on wheels, two yellow and re-usable No Frills shopping bags, and a second, smaller, suitcase. At around 3 a.m. that same night, I looked out again and saw her standing and smoking a cigarette. She was talking to a blonde boy with a fringed haircut straight out of Slowdive.
I couldn’t tell if he had just happened by, or if he was a friend and she had been sitting there waiting for him to arrive. I couldn’t even tell if I was awake or dreaming. Dreaming I was back in the 90s, because when was the last time you saw a young man with a fringe haircut? Then I realized aesthetically and stylistically 2021 is the new 1993 and that my past and my present were one, and I had grave and important thoughts like this while I watched the two of them walk away.
I assumed that would be that. We live in East Van, across the street from a lively bus stop and a couple very inviting awnings. It is not at all unusual to look out the window at night and see people crouched with their last remaining possessions waiting out the rain or the dark. Does not happen every night. Does happen at least once a month. The corner across from my house is clearly a well-known, well-worn location for people at one of life’s least pleasant crossroads. It had also always been a waystation, a place between places, nothing but a temporary whistle-stop on someone’s underground railroad. No one had ever come back before. No one has stayed.
The girl with blue hair came back two nights later. The building to which the awnings belong closes at eight for the night, and she drifted back into her old spot promptly a few minutes after. At around five in the morning, I looked out my window and saw her talking to another dude, casually dressed and bearded. They puffed on their smokes. Then they appeared to copulate while standing. When it was finished, they kept talking for a bit and then he left. She sat back down behind her belonging and stayed until nine or ten.
I didn’t see her at all the next week.
She returned during a heatwave. Only now her hair was yellow on top of blue and she had shed the second suitcase. She kept her leather jacket on the whole time even though all of the people passed her were wearing shorts and hats and a lot of them were ducking inside an Emergency Cooling Centre. At two in the afternoon, when she finally gave in and went inside to get cool, it must have felt like 52 degrees in her jacket in the sun.
I didn’t see her come out and I didn’t see her again for another week.
When she returned, just three nights ago, she was down to a backpack and two bags and her hair was back to just being blue. She resumed her usual position under the awning and at around two in the morning she fell into what looked like a deep sleep sitting up, her body slumped forward and to the sideways over a shopping bag.
At around five in the morning, I looked out and she was still sleeping.
At seven, I looked again and I watched as two men approached. They walked past her. Then they circled back, both of them carrying unlit cigarettes. I watched as the one with a baseball cap went up to the sleeping girl with blue hair while the other one, the one with black trackpants in a vertical, triple chevron pattern, walked to the far edge of the street to make sure the coast was clear. It was. I watched as the man with the baseball cap pretended to ask the sleeping girl for a light. Then, once he was sure she was in a dead sleep, he slipped his arm inside the girl’s backpack, threw it over his own shoulder and walked back the way he had come. I did the same thing I had been doing the past three weeks.
Nothing.
I didn’t call the police. I didn’t take a twenty-second trip down five flights of stairs to tell her she’d been robbed of most of whatever puny material comfort she’d managed to hold onto. I did nothing.
People have told me the VPD would have been slow to respond. That they are understaffed, fatigued by a never-ending opioid crisis, and likely wouldn’t have come at all. I have heard all the horror stories of Vancouverite women calling 911 to report repeat stalkers and getting told that’s not an emergency, being referred to a “community policing” hotline: average wait time—four hours. They console me that well over a thousand windows see that same awning, that it’s likely the police were called (multiple times), that at least she was not physically harmed. Well-meaning but meaningless consolation.
I failed her and I failed myself. That’s what really happened.
I’ve found myself thinking the same things all week, thoughts so fervent, so constant, and so desperate that they feel like prayers, and I realized I have been praying, not to any God with any name, but out of habit and because I have not been able to stop that moment from playing in my head and no matter how many times I run the scenario, the choice I made—to turn away from the window and resume my coffee—comes up as the one most likely to damn me to eternal hell. Kindness takes courage and in that split-second when both were instantly needed, I could summon neither one.
I am sorry for always being so self-righteously critical of everyone else when I still have so much work to do on my own useless and cowardly self.
Why, a curious reader might reasonably inquire, am I staring out my window at all hours of the night? Because, and here I am inserting a personal note, last month I was diagnosed with a urachal cyst. Quick! Point to your urachus, everybody! --fastest finger wins.
Confidentially, I didn’t even know I had my own urachus, or I would have started making yourachass jokes (youracheass?) a long time ago. I have an upcoming CT scan and, urachus crossed, it is not cancer. Either way, the urachus has got to go and so I am waiting for a surgery date. By surgery date I do not mean a date for my surgery, like a prom date—although if asking someone out to be your date for surgery was the custom, I see no reason why I would not participate in it, I would even rent a tux.
My urachus is why I’m up all night—six, seven times. It’s no excuse for doing nothing, but it is a reason, let’s hope not, why I might soonishly disappear into my own nothingness. Whenever I eventually do depart, I fully expect to be called to account for the three weeks I watched one girl suffer alone and didn’t lift a finger to help her, even as I watched her get robbed. That one went on my permanent record, I’m afraid.
Maybe once the urachus is gone, you’ll finally grow up! 🤣