Harris swallowed and looked away. How pathetic was it that he couldn’t even seize control of this degraded situation? Very.
“We need to talk,” Harris said. “Let me buy you a drink.”
Roen protested thinly about not drinking. But Harris knew that resolve was going to fail. They went into the Union Tavern. Found a table in a dark corner. Blue lights over the bar. People hunched over pitchers of terrible draft beer and shots of Jägermeister. In a nearby booth, a glowing pipe made the rounds.
“Who else did we hang with that summer?” Roen was asking.
“You, me, and Murch,” Harris said. “Jin and Shanny you remember. Then Calliope and Zach and Purma.”
“Purma,” Roen said softly. “Purma I still see around.”
Even if Harris had understood what that meant, he knew he wouldn’t have done anything differently. He went to the bar. He brought back four beers and two large vodkas.
“Murchie, you devil,” Roen said.
“Harris.”
“Right,” Roen said. And he tipped a vodka down his throat.
It wasn’t hard to do, in the end, to slide back into those very old rhythms, altered only in a minor way by the years. They had four beers and two vodkas apiece inside an hour and Harris didn’t even feel buzzed. But Roen was flying. He was laughing. He was making fun of Harris’s clothes and his books, which Harris stupidly mentioned.
“Harvey Raven?” Roen said, eyes wide with mirth. “See, that’s a problem, right there.” Cultural appropriation, he explained. Raven sounded First Nations. And Harris himself was quite clearly not. Roen laughing. “My round?” he said. “Oh, no, wait, Murch here is buying.”
Fuck, Harris thought. But he did not even bother correcting him. More beers. More vodka. At some point he realized that they were hunched in over the table, talking in urgent voices, Roen protesting, Harris stabbing the air with his finger. At some later point, Harris realized that they were sitting amidst that squalor of Roen’s apartment and that Harris was holding a pipe from which he was about to take a hit.
He’d never used meth before. And as he stood trembling in his Kits apartment remembering all of this, he realized that he wouldn’t be doing it again. So terrible and wonderful had been the experience. The rush visceral, physical, enormous. He surged out of himself. He rose to the ceiling. The high was like white water rafting, followed by a steep and sheering free fall, his belly aflame and taut. He would consume the world.
Harris holding a set of familiar keys in his hand which he’d just declared he was going to copy. Roen crying. “You can’t do this to me, man,” he was saying. His nose running and his eyes bloodred. “You cannot fucking do this. You have no idea who these people are. They will fucking find you.”
But Harris would not be stopped. What he was taking, which didn’t belong to Roen anyway, had a broader, rectifying power, a means by which his personal history might finally and truly be cleansed after all that earlier, pointless trying.
Time to end this. The ritual that ends in blood.
Absolute darkness. That’s what such moments required. Harris saw it and left Roen where he sat, bawling in his wheelchair. His life didn’t last long after that. By Harris’s own best math, he was himself on Saturna Island when it happened, down in the orchard. A creak of a door to a hidden cellar opened, heavy plastic tubs thudded down to the floor, bales of cash into black garbage bags, loaded into a rusted minivan he’d bought for the purpose. Ford Windstar. What luck to discover one of those for sale, the exact vehicle envisioned for his future. It worked for the purpose, parked and waiting in the long weeds. The whole operation took an hour, at the climax of which Roen either pressed the gun to his own head or submitted to it being applied there by professionals in that trade. Either way, Harris felt the shot in that instant. He heard it in his heart. And it knocked him to his knees in the wet grass, where he stayed a long time sobbing, one hand on a rusted fender.
Alone in Kitsilano and trapped utterly. All that money, enough to dissolve the biggest problems, all useless to Harris now; he didn’t dare show his face outside, much less spend a single bill. Defeated in his own crafty victory, while the rain gathered, and something circled possessively, some entity in the night drawing close.
He took to the window, pulled back the blinds. His breath was coming in ragged tears. There was only a single path open now, only a single decision possible in that blackest of moments.
He was on the street. He was in the park. He slipped through the trees and out onto the sand, running now, a shape moving behind him. Footsteps that were not there. Between the logs and to the water’s edge, where the world tipped away from what it was into the airless blackness of a world that was not.
A whisper behind him: Tell me where. Nobody. But Harris still moved forward into the waves, up to his knees, his thighs.
Absolute darkness.
8
The body on Kits Beach made news. It was a bigger deal than a drug dealer dead in a burning Viper. He was a local writer, after all, if not that well known. And he’d drowned off one of Vancouver’s most popular beaches, pulled onto the sand by a Portuguese water dog whose owner did not wish to be interviewed. Drunk swimming, they said. But who swam drunk in March at two in the morning?
No one. Not the lawyer either. Found dead in Crab Park. One shot to the back of the head.
The headlines screamed: “THEY KNEW EACH OTHER!”
Didn’t matter. They were dead. They couldn’t talk. Neither did anyone else who mattered.
Purma, for her part, went directly to the police. The three of them had met not long before the two men died. It had been a memorial for yet another friend who’d apparently committed suicide.
All this was very confusing. Lots of speculation. But she was clean. The cops liked her. She did good work in the Downtown Eastside and they left her alone. Last question she fielded from the detectives was if Harris owned a car.
No, Purma said. He used a car service, Car2go.
Which was curious, the cops thought, given they found a car key in his apartment but nothing registered in his name. What kind of car? They sent it out for identification and waited almost six weeks. The results did not inspire any kind of follow-up.
Purma went back to what she had been doing. Three old friends gone in a couple of months. It was the kind of thing you tried to forget if you had people dropping all around you, which she did, literally. The Downtown Eastside was not getting better. Her work wasn’t getting any easier.
Three years passed.
And one day, it was time. A year per loss? Maybe. Purma on a ferry. Purma in the swell, in the rolling waves. Purma on an old road with a backpack, walking those two kilometers to the place where it all began, or where it had all stopped. Thinking back on it, she couldn’t be sure.
Purma on a morning hike that they had themselves done so many times before. Up the ridgeline to the back road. Around to the lip of trees. Left into the auto graveyard. Purma had no reason to be there other than having been many times before, long ago. Rotting vehicles consumed by moss or sprouting trees. In some cases, the salt air had whittled the frames down to intricate carvings.
To the back. To a car in the middle of the last row wedged in tight against a Garry oak. Nothing special about this one. But she rubbed the moss clean off the grill to find the word: Windstar.
Frozen. Remembering. How awful had she been back then? And in an impulsive instant, she acted on the thought. She hefted a rock. And she heaved it through the windshield.