There are certainly some expectations when trespassing in a vacated home. It’ll be quiet of course — a deep, engulfing quiet that only comes when the electricity is turned off for good, and the space has been empty long enough for the crackle of human existence to float off into the atmosphere. Energy never dies so it must go somewhere else. Maybe it goes to other neighborhoods, but what’s left sinks to the earth like a deflated balloon. These leftovers — dust, moss, mold — are the biology of the dying home. Distasteful things that might make us feel better about the living, breathing biology of our own homes. South Cambie is a dead neighborhood slowly being ingested by condos, but I’ll get to that later.
This body smells like someone threw steak in the compost. It’s not overwhelming because the body isn’t that old. It’s dressed in a V-neck undershirt and a cardigan, pants cut awkwardly above the ankle, no socks. Skate shoes. Some people don’t like this look — kind of normcore — but I do. Simple and youthful. There are no visible wounds, but rats have eaten its eyes. I assume it was rats, anyway. Maybe eyes are a rat delicacy, or maybe just a habitual first target, like when we get a chocolate Easter bunny and go straight for the ears.
Here’s another unexpected thing, I knew this body when it housed a person. His name was Daniel, but he went by
Diezl. I may have been the last one to see Diezl alive — around this time yesterday — and that brings a prickly feeling of responsibility to the situation. And so, standing here in this mausoleum, I try to remember what color Diezl’s eyes were. And, obviously, wonder how the hell he ended up here.
It doesn’t look like he was dragged — this would have left a trail of displaced junk, since the house is full of it: empty beer bottles, needles, piles of pink insulation. He must have died inside, but why would he come here? His territory is way down past 49th, in the neighborhood that’s still mostly alive — for now. But Diezl’s body appears to have just materialized here, the rotting sneakers and McDonald’s bags around it untouched. He always had his skateboard and his bag of spray cans with him, but there’s no sign of them. My flashlight flicks across his hands, curled into a rigor mortis grip. Diezl has huge hands, always stained with paint.
Through a busted window, I can see the dark outline of my own house. Ben will still be asleep.
I’ve been breaking into the abandoned places in South Cambie for a while now. A person needs to know the story of the land they live on, even if it’s not pretty. Especially if it’s not pretty. Some houses have been sitting empty since the push to redevelop the neighborhood started last year, while others are freshly vacated. Companies like Millennium and Bosa have bought up nearly everything, but not the place where Ben and I live, not yet. Ben’s buddy owns it — he told us he’s holding out for eight million, and if you think that’s crazy, you don’t know Vancouver. The last offer he got was four million, so for now we get to stay. He says that if the cops find us squatting, he’ll deny knowing us. Ben hates that, but he puts up with it.
Most of the glass is long gone from the windowpane, but I still take my time crawling out. A couple of rats look up at my dangling feet, unafraid. There’s been an influx of rats recently. A lot of them get hit by cars, their little mashed bodies rotting in the street. Yesterday, I opened a cupboard door and found a smallish one nibbling on Ben’s cookies. It’s not a great place to live, I’ll admit. But it’s practically free, and that feels like giving the finger to capitalism.
I’ll also admit that when we moved here six months ago, the dying houses totally freaked me out. This one is in terrible shape: crumbled carport, roof caving, thick moss on the siding. Ample signs of the neighborhood taggers brighten things up a bit, but they worried me too at first. I thought they were gangs — Diezl had a good laugh about that. Fukit seems to be a pretty prolific artistic presence in this neighborhood; his tags are all over. There may be a turf war going on, though, since **Kitten** has been making a move, painting right over Fukit’s old tags. Or maybe Fukit just got tired and fucked off. It wouldn’t surprise me. Everyone in the city seems to have forgotten South Cambie exists. Weeks go by without anyone collecting our garbage or recycling. Most of the garbage in this backyard is ours, we just toss it when the bins fill up. This is supposed to be my last break-in, since it was the house I was the most intimidated by when we first moved to the neighborhood. Some kind of milestone, but I’m not sure for what any more. Diezl was disappointed that I wanted to do it alone.
Around the time things started to get a little rough with Ben, I started going for long walks in the neighborhood. The first time, I was getting out of the shower and he was pissed because I’d used all the hot water. This isn’t hard to do, since the water heater has been leaking like crazy for ages. I told him if we just showered together it wouldn’t be a problem, and for some reason he flew off the handle and started yelling, pushed me and I slipped on the wet floor and banged my face on the towel rack. I chipped a tooth and split my lip. Pretty dramatic, I guess, but Ben swore that hadn’t been his intention — like, to actually injure me — and of course he was right. He’s not a violent guy. Still, the last thing I wanted to do was crawl into bed next to him. I slipped out while he was screwing the towel rack back into the wall, looking miserable. He really did seem to feel guilty about it.
The place next door — creepy in the day and downright terrifying at night — looks right into our backyard, since someone ripped the plywood off the windows. Awful whether I pictured a human standing in the shadows watching, or the vacant stare of the house itself. I went out the front. We’re on the southwest corner, surrounded by huge laurel hedges that hide the house completely. But we exist. There’s an overgrown staircase that’s easy to miss, almost like bushwhacking out of a magical secret garden, except totally not. I bushwhacked out of a giant, moldering house that was somebody’s affordable palace in the seventies, but it’s a dump now, because why would anyone take care of something with numbered days? Spongy walls, split hardwood floors, and high ceilings that cave in a little and dump plaster muck on the floor when it rains.
It was one in the morning, and there wasn’t much open in Cambie Village. The presence of the Canada Line station across the street makes the neighborhood a fairly unsafe place to be at night, even though it’s sandwiched between Shaughnessy to the west and Queen Elizabeth Park to the east. I decided to walk south, toward 49th. That’s where I met Diezl.
He passed me on his skateboard, then stopped. “You should be careful, there’s some guy in the neighborhood grabbing women at night.”
“Grabbing them?” I looked at his hands and quickly back up at his face, hoping that hadn’t made it seem like I was implicating him. Those humongous hands on such a small guy.
He didn’t seem to notice. “Yeah, sorry to be creepy but...”
“That’s not creepy — I mean, you telling me isn’t creepy. Thanks.”
“Okay.” His eyes searched my face for a second and I felt a little thrill for some reason, like this was a movie and something amazing was about to happen. “Your chin.”
I remembered my split lip, and rubbed the dried blood off my chin.
He nodded, and pushed off on his skateboard, looking back at me once before he disappeared out of the streetlights.
Three nights later, when Ben and I drank a lot of beers in the backyard, and he smacked me across the face for breaking his second-favorite pint glass, and then cried for nearly an hour, I took off again. This time it was closer to two a.m. Eyes peeled for any dudes who looked like they might want to grab me, I found myself smiling at the approaching sound of wheels clicking on the sidewalk cracks.