“One of the few intelligent things Reagan ever said,” someone says at my elbow. I turn. She’s overdressed; wears a BC
government pin on one lapel and a button on the other. The button shows planet Earth encircled by the words “We’re all in this together”.
But at least she’s one of us.
“But he was right,” I reply. “Threaten the whole human race and our international squabbling seems so petty.”
She nods, smiling. “That’s why I put it up. It’s not really part of the presentation, but I thought it fit.”
“Of course, we don’t have space aliens to hate. But not to worry. There’s always an enemy, somewhere.”
Her smile falters a bit. “What do you mean?”
“If not space aliens, the Russians. If not the Russians, the local ethnics. I stayed on an island once where the lobstermen on the south end all hated the herring fishermen on the north. They all seemed the same to me, a lot of them were even related, but they had to be able to hate someone somewhere.”
She clucks and shakes her head in cynical accord.
“Of course, both sides banded together to hate all off-islanders,” I add.
“Of course.”
“A single human being, the whole damn species, or any level in between, and the pattern’s the same, isn’t it? It’s like hatred is—”
I see galaxies within galaxies.
“—scale-invariant,” I finish slowly.
She looks at me, a bit strangely. “Uh—”
“But of course, there are also a lot of positive things happening. People can co-operate when they have to.”
Her smile reinflates. “Exactly.”
“Like the natives. Banding together to save their cultures, forgetting their differences. The Haidas even stopped taking slaves from other tribes.”
She isn’t smiling at all now. “The Haida,” she says, “haven’t taken slaves for generations.”
“Oh, that’s right. We put a stop to that about—I guess it was even before we banned the potlatch, wasn’t it? But eventually they’ll want to start up again. I mean, slavery was integral to their culture, and we simply must protect the integrity of everyone’s culture here, mustn’t we?”
“I don’t think you’ve got all your facts straight,” she says slowly.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought we were multicultural. I thought Canadians were supposed to—” I spy some bold print a few boards down— “to allow different cultures to flourish side by side without imposing our own moral and ethical standards on them.”
“Within the law,” she says. I wait, but she’s wary now, unwilling to speak further.
So I do. “Then as a woman, I’m sure you’re pleased that Muslim men won’t have to stop the traditional subjugation of their wives when they come here. As long as they keep it in the home, of course.”
“Excuse me.” She turns her back to me, takes a step along the display.
“You’re lying to us,” I say, raising my voice. A couple of bystanders turn their heads.
She faces me, mouth open to speak. I pre-empt her: “Or perhaps you’re lying to them. But you can’t have it both ways, and you can’t change the facts no matter how many bad classroom cartoons you force on us.”
There’s a part of me that hasn’t enjoyed provoking the anger in her face. A few days ago, it might even have been the biggest part. But it’s only a few thousand years old, tops, and the rest of me really doesn’t give a shit.
I lift my arm in a gesture that takes in the whole display. “If I were a racist,” I tell her, “this wouldn’t begin to convince me.”
I bare my teeth in a way that might be mistaken for a smile. I turn and walk deeper into the building.
Here it is: on the back page of Section C, in a newspaper almost two weeks old. Didn’t even make it to the airwaves, I guess. What difference does one more battered Asian make, after all the gang warfare going down in Chinatown? No wonder I missed it.
He had a name. Wai Chan. Found unconscious at a North Van housing development owned by Balthree Properties, where he was—
(Balthree Properties? They’re local, aren’t they?)
—where he was employed as a night watchman. In stable condition after being attacked by an unknown assailant. No motive. No suspects.
Bullshit. Half the fucking city is suspect, we’ve all got motive, and they know it.
Or maybe they don’t. Maybe they believe all the stories they feed us that say Hey, High-Density Living Good For You, Crime Rate Unconnected To Population Size, Massive Immigration Keeps Us Safe From America, hurrah hurrah! Nothing like giving yourself a mild case of cancer to cure the measles, and every time somebody projects that the lower mainland will be sixty percent Chinese by 2010 the news is buried in a wave of stories about international goodwill and the cultural mosaic. Maybe they don’t know what it’s like to go back to the place you grew up and find it ripped to the ground, some offshore conglomerate’s turned it into another hive crammed with pulsing yellow grubs, perhaps Balthree Properties isn’t run out of Hong Kong after all but I didn’t know that then, did I? That used to be my home, there were trees there once, and childhood friends, and now just mud and lumber and this ugly little Chink yammering at me, barely even speaks the fucking language and he’s kicking me out of my own back yard —
Once I felt guilty about what I did to him. I was sick with remorse. That was stupid, woolly thinking. My guilt doesn’t spring from the one time I let the monster out. No sirree.
It springs from all the other times I didn’t.
The Indians are on the warpath. From the endowment lands on east, they’re blocking us. We’re on their land, they say. They want justice. They want retribution. They want autonomy.
Don’t tell me, noble savage. So do I.
Traffic moves nose-to-bumper like a procession of slugs. At this rate it’ll be hours before I even get out of town, let alone home. There was a time when I could afford to live in town. There was even a time when I wanted to. Now, all I want to do is scream.
There’s a group of Indian kids at the roadside, enjoying the chaos their parents have wrought. I bear them no ill will; the natives are a conquered people, drunk and unemployed, no threat to anyone. I sympathise. I honk my horn in support.
Thunk! A spiderweb explodes across my windshield, glassy cracks dividing and redividing into a network too fine to for my eyes to follow, I can barely see through—
Jesus! That sonofabitch threw a rock at me! There he is, winding up for another—no, he’s after someone else this time, our ancestors weren’t nice to their ancestors and this brat thinks that gives him some god-given moral right to trash other people’s property—
I don’t have to take this. I didn’t take their fucking land away from them. Get off to the side, onto the shoulder—now floor it! Watch the skid, watch the skid—and look at those punks scrambling out of the way! One of them isn’t quite fast enough; catches my eye as he rolls off the hood, and holy shit did his sneer vanish in a hurry! I do believe he already regrets the rashness of his actions, and we’ve barely started dancing yet.
I turn off the ignition. I pocket the keys.